What we're doing: July 2006

Our new beach cruisers and trailer

bikes2
Originally uploaded by dwinn.

The newest toys for our family should be a lot of fun and good exercise for us too. We can't wait to ride down to the beach.

AshNic Bumbo

sittin

4th of j = July weekend

We've both been working hard at learning how to raise our first child and our jobs, so we decided a vacation for the 4th of j was well deserved.

Our planning at first became confusing since this holiday landed on a Tuesday. what the... We usually checkout [mentally] towards the end of Friday, expecting not to check-back-in until at least a Tuesday for the 4th. So we decided to splurge and use up a few vacation days to extend our Tuesday holiday into a 5 day mini vaca.

We had pipe dreams of going away for 5 days since this is a rare opportunity for us. But we quickly realized that our budget didn't allow for this, and decided to do some things locally we never find time for - along with a short trip up the coast.

day 1:
We started our time off by not going into the office, spending the morning with ashnic and visiting the Long Beach Aquarium [thanks to tickets from our friend Art at bluemarble].

day 2:
Saturday was our day to get our errands out of the way; laundry, bills, grocery shopping and packing for our getaway. Our reward at the end of the day; (staying with the local theme) was Grandma watching Ashnic while we snuck away to the movies to see Nacho Libre. Nicole loved the movie.

day: 3
Our getaway:

1. first stop Santa Barbara.
We have been to Santa Barbara a few times now, but never to the beach. So we drove to the shore for a walk along the boardwalk, ate some lunch, followed by some sun at the beach. Check out the hippie bus and the sand art for the 4th of j and a memorable bumper sticker.

2. then off to our highlight of this trip: our stay at the Madonna Inn in San Louis Obispo [SLO]. We have been by this "[insert your own adjective]" hotel many times on our trips up the coast. We were curious to see if it would be cheesey.

We enjoyed ourselves. The "Short and Tall" room was pink with antique furniture and a balcony with a sun-filled view of the mountains. There was a mis-leading on their part advertising HBO on the teli [I missed Entourage], but caught back up with the help of our DVR (not a single tuner TiVo). The Steak House was great and ashnic gnawed on her first carrot.

Ashnic's first carrot

The topic of the evening was the men's bathroom urinal. Okay, think of a step-down shower and you standing on the top step pissing down with a waterfall standing in a horizontal line with others.

day: 4
we got to drop-in on our buddy matt and his family for a brief period in Atascadero. We looked for a Lazy Boy store for awhile to find a new couch, but gave up after going up and down the highway with no luck. Is there a Main St. off the 101 in Paso Robles? and then back home again.

day: 5: 4th of j.
we had the pleasure of Nicoles parents spending the night at our house the night before so the family [excluding Daddy who slept in] could go see the 4th of j parade dowtown HB. Followed by a great day of both our family's filled with an excellent carne asada dinner [thanks to mom, nic and chris], good times and love. For those of us who survived the sundown hours, we trekked down to the beach to watch the fireworks from the pier.