Three hundred and eighty-two photos later, I left California.
But I guess we'll start at the beginning, with WORDS! ADDED! for EMPHASIS!
Monday morning at the crack coke of dawn (but still an hour behind Meg, Vanesa and Alex), I boarded my flight to San Francisco. We met up at the airport where they'd already picked up our girly convertible (ha! HA!) and we managed sans data roaming! to find Angela's place in the Mission. FYI, San Francisco is the cutest city in North America, as far as I'm aware, and we spent the day driving around yelling "CUTE!" with the top down, our hair whipping around and looking distinctly NOT cute. We tried to ride some giant seagulls by the wharf, but they seemed uninterested in anything besides our seafood snacks. Because calories on vacation don't count obviously, we also had cactus burritos, Ghirardelli chocolate, cheap PBR/whiskey deals and found our favourite local beer to bring back to Angela's for some party times.
Angela's adorable Mission district home.
Yes, this WAS the closest we got to Alcatraz. BECAUSE WE'RE GOOD PEOPLE!
Day 2 started with a tough wakeup (I hadn't slept for 40 hours before crashing on the couch a couple of Anchor Steams into our Angela jam) followed by the cheapest manicures imaginable and some pretty incredible coffee around the corner from her place. And then we were off towards Santa Barbara, a trip we thought would only take seven hours. As it happened, they were seven of the most scenic hours imaginable, with the weather as moody as we were by the time we finally arrived, well past an hour that anything is still open in Santa Barbara. So after a Bedbugs And Bloodstains check at our ratty SB motel, we were only able to find dinner at a neighbouring 7-Eleven (I had a banana!) Luckily for us, "champagne" costs practically pennies at the Sev Elev, so we chugged some of that and watched lady movies on cable.
Discovered my new favourite chocolate bar at Trader Joe's, the most wonderful store in the whole universe.
