Driving down to LA

For our 5th anniversary, we drove down with no plans other than to leave Saturday night from San Diego.  Andy had this plan and didn't tell me until a couple days before.  We left Sunday morning in a rental car (we would leave it down there and fly home).

Our first day was just a lot of driving.  We were staying at his mom's house in Sacramento over night (which is funny because we never saw her since she was flying up to stay with the boys all week.)  We had made this drive a few times so we just did a straight show down.

We had to stop at Dutch Bros.  It is so good and there aren't any close by.  I think they are creeping up, but they are mainly OR area.

Welcome to CA!

 We made it to Sacramento around midnight.

The next morning we had a healthy breakfast: double-doubles and fries (Andy's animal style)

We headed out of town and got a little lost.  We ended up on the opposite side of the Golden Gate Bridge than we normally go to, which was cool because you see the whole city of San Francisco behind it.

We even drove over the bridge.

We drove for awhile over to Monterey Bay, then hopped on highway 1.  Andy thought it would be a cool time driving along the ocean cliffs.  It was...for about 20 minutes.  Then it was just like 3 hours of slow driving down VERY windy roads through cliffs.  We drove through Big Sur and some other not very interesting spots.  I felt SO sick, that I forced myself to fall asleep.  The problem was that there was no escape to the main highways the whole time.  We had no idea when we started that road that we were stuck.  It was such a waste of time!  However, we DID see whales jumping out of the water flipping like in the movies!  Here is one in the middle of the picture but he isn't flipping.

The cliffs were pretty.

Andy ended up back on the freeway as it was getting dark and we saw an AWESOME super moon reflecting in the water.  We needed to find a hotel, so we ended up in Santa Barbara.  It is SUPER cute!  They had an awesome touristy block too, but we were so tired and didn't want to hit up the bar scene so we ended up at Denny's after checking into a Motel 6.

When we woke up, we saw how cool of a place we ended up.  Here was from our hotel parking lot.

We walked along the beach really quick in Santa Barbara and set off again.  We were trying to find food.  We ended up in Ventura.  It is funny because all these cities are where I have AT&T stores for work, so it was cool to put pictures in my head to the places I talk to on a daily basis.  We decided to stop at the Ventura pier.

 It was a good thing we did, because we had the best fish tacos ever!  Mine had pineapple salsa!

We hopped back on the road after eating and ended up at the Santa Monica pier.

We ended up walking down to Venice Beach.  We saw all sorts of crazy art, about 10 shops selling medical marijuana cards, and the famous muscle beach.

We walked back and realized we had walked about 5 miles.  It was very pretty though, even though my feet were sore.

Under the Santa Monica Pier

I had called my friend Jiavani (we grew up together) and let her know we were going to be in the area.  Lucky for us, she invited us to stay at our house while we were in LA, so we only had to pay one hotel the entire time (and it was only $100!)  We got really lucky there.  After a few hours in Santa Monica, we decided to head to Hollywood to wait for Jia to get off work.