Monday, March 28, 2011

More Firsts

After a week of pretty constant rain, things let up over the weekend.  This was a good thing since we were driving into the mountains to check out our friends' new house.  The drive into the Santa Cruz mountains is gorgeous with amazing vistas.  There are stretches (8 miles in one part) where signage warns you of the winding road ahead, and that's no joke.  When it's dark and rainy, it's more thrill ride than pleasure cruise.


Not having been to their house before, it made things easier if we met them and followed them to their place as the meandering path on private mountain roads can be tricky.  Directions like turn left at the tree with the sign nailed to it or turn right at the propane tank are harder to follow than turn right at the bank or head South on Hwy 55.  Before meeting up, we checked out some of the local shops in "downtown", which is a couple of blocks of stores lining the highway, and had some chai at The White Raven Coffee Shop.  




While Conery and I were sipping our chai, I saw two guys running across the road in wet suits and boogie boards.  This would have seemed totally normal to me if we weren't in the mountains.  One of the wet suit-clad guys came into the coffee shop and talked the shopkeep into giving him a cup of coffee with the promise of payment later.  




I was thinking that I was witnessing more of that trusting West coast blind faith both Conery and I have experienced, but it became clear near the end of the conversation that they knew each other.  


On our way to their place, we came across the entrance to Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park.  




We are definitely going to spend some time hiking through the park.


On Sunday, we got a message from our friend Lisa Lee, an avid blog reader who lives in Orlando.  Lisa wins the "first Orlando peep to visit" prize!  She works for an airline and has frequent layovers, so we'll get to see her more often.  We rescued her from her hotel and stopped for some drinks and appetizers.  


Conery and Lisa in the posh lounge at the Spin a Yarn.


After our bottle of wine was gone, we decided to head toward our place and hang out.  Because we'd had more wine than food, we stopped off for some food at Falafel, Etc.


Falafels, Etc.

The restaurant is in a strange little shopping plaza with other restaurants like the Muncher House.

Muncher House Deli

The architecture makes the plaza seem like a weird little village.


We are looking forward to more trips to Santa Cruz as well as more visits from our East Coast friends and family!


[update] I realized after talking to the amazing Anne Hennessey a few minutes ago that I neglected to include another first.


Haley's first dog park fight!


That's right our little scrapper mixed it up a bit yesterday at the park.  There are different areas of the park where dogs and people congregate.  There was a guy with two dogs at one end of the park where he was hanging with his dogs.  Our dogs usually stay within a 25' radius of us.  We'll walk around the park to get them to interact with other dogs, so we walked over to the water bowls, which is near the end of the park.  One of the guy's dogs came over and was checking out Haley.  They were sniffin' - doin' their thing, when *WHAM*, the other dog started attacking Haley.  Haley is not submissive when it comes to situations like that, and she defended herself.  When other dogs hear the hubbub, they come running.  Dexter was trying to get into the mix by barking and hopping around...real helpful, eh?  Dexter is all amped up.  Some other dog starts playing around with him.  He starts getting all defensive.  The owner of the dog getting into it with Dexter comes over; she is super freaked out.   

In the end, Haley has a few battle scars on her snout.  The guy was super apologetic; he ended up leashing his dog and leaving soon after.  It was utter chaos for a few minutes, but after that everyone was friendly.  The whole incident was forgotten.  If only people got over things so quickly...

2 comments:

  1. People should be like dogs after a spat smell each other crotches and go on with it. Hay wait a minute.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd love a bottle of win.

    ReplyDelete