Chico or Bust! (Part 2)

The next place we went was Honey Run.

Honey Run road contains one of the few last covered bridges in California. 

It is also the only three tiered wooden covered bridge in the United States.

It's pretty special.

I've wanted to go see it since I moved to Chico and thought it might be a great place 

to visit with my parents.

Since I had never been there I googled directions.

We ended up taking the long way of course.

Along the single car windy road instead of on the fairly flat two lane road. 

The windy road was an adventure though and it was actually kinda cool because 

the road was covered in graffiti.

The outside
You can no longer drive on it but I'm glad. I enjoyed taking my time walking the length of the bridge. I got to stop and look at all of the nooks and crannies.

It is crazy to think that something built almost 120 years ago out of wood is still standing. 

I can only imagine how many people have crossed this bridge.

The inside....

The inside was so intricate. 

View from the inside. (look at my fancy composition)

Gorgeous creek running below.

Look out below!

View from the other side. You can see where the new bridge was built in order
to preserve the wooden one.

Half way through!

At the very end, looking back. 

The only scary thing is you can only have 120 people on the bridge....

View from the ground with my feet in the water. 

Man did it feel good.

The water was so nice.

The underneath view.

Water rushing over some stacked rocks.

 This place was so pretty and a great place to take the family and picnic.
I really enjoyed the history of it.

Chico or Bust! (Part 1)

Summer is almost over so it's back to Chico! Since I don't have a car my parents drove me back up and decided to have a little vacation touring around Chico. 

Chico is known for a few things. The great outdoors activities. The Sierra Nevada Brewery. And of course the..well we will just call it the "night life". 

We came. We saw. We concurred Chico.

The beautifully boring 8 hour drive up. 

That is literally all you see on the 5.

Plus the car was packed tight with all my "crap". 

I had about 12 inches of seat.

We made it to Chico and this was our forecast for the week....

Yeah we don't get this hot on the coast..... ever,

In touristing it up we visited Upper and Lower Park.

First we went to Upper Bidwell Park. 

Here is a little background info (if it's wrong blame google). Bidwell Park was given to Chico by its founders General John and Annie Bidwell. It is a 3,618 acre municipal park and I love every bit of it. Upper Park is more of the wild lands with water holes, hiking trails, biking, and camping. You take a rocky dirt road back into no-mans land. 

I wanted to show them Bear hole where I normally go to relax and swim. 

Here is a very smokey Upper Park. There are tons of fires going on in northern California right now and boy could you smell it!

Bear hole with crystal clear water.

I think it speaks for itself, don't you?

It's just absolutely gorgeous. Those rock however are very deceiving. They are volcanic (I think). Well they get so hot they feel like a volcano. So hot you have to sit on a folded up towel or you will literally burn yourself. And they are slippery! I slipped trying to get out of the water once and ate it. 

This however is typical.

If I can hurt myself in some way I will.

I get it from my mom.

Blame her.

I do!

Awwwww!!!!

or is it

Ahhhhhhhh?

(or that someone screaming?)

I don't know just pretend you hear angles singing at all its glory.

We then went to Lower Park which is more the picnicking, leisure bike riding, playing catch in the park kinda place. Completely different from upper park and beautiful in its own right.

Here they dam up the river and create a pool in the summer time for everyone to go swimming in.

The water is a great way to cool off in the hot summer heat.

I didn't take too many pictures there because I was enjoying putting my feet in the water and just relaxing (i.e. cooling off) so I thought I would add a couple pictures I took from last winter.

I love that you can see the icy bitter coldness in these pictures. (It's helping me cool off a little)

 Even with all the leaves gone it's still stunning. 

If you visit Chico you must visit Bidwell Park. 

It is one of Chico's gems

Day at the Beach!

Let me just start by saying, I'm pooped.
And sunburnt.
To a crisp.
Seriously my face is the color of a tomato.
I'm now sitting on the couch in a parka because I'm freezing.

And a seagull ate my sandwich......
It was packed away in a bag in my purse.
I took all precautions to ensure my sandwich would not be eaten while I was in the water.
Obviously the seagull out smarted me.
I'm not bitter obviously....

With that said I had a great day. I spent the day at Carpinertia State beach with my mom, my best friend Jazzyknickers (that's what I've called for, well, for as long as I can remember. Can anyone name the book it's from?) and her little brother. Carp is just a short drive from my house and one of my favorite beaches. Boy was it packed today too! I have been wanting to go to the beach and swim for a long time. It has just been too gosh darn cold! But today was beautiful.

Here's me and Jazzy after our hour long romp in the ocean. It took me 45 min to convince her to put her head under when the waves come. She's a chicken.

Here is the little man (refusing to let me take his picture) looking for sand dollars and sand crabs. No sand dollars but hundreds of sand crabs!

He broke that bucket 10 minutes later by the way.

Along with the shovel.......

My feetsies after testing the water temperature. Little man says it was "50/50" and 

I agree the water wasn't half bad once you got in.

The gorgeous beach. I love this beach because there isn't much seaweed or rocks. We played in the water for almost an hour. See that thing floating out there? That's a platform you can swim to! The only downside is bird poop. Yep that's right there's birds at the beach and they poop. On everything.....But nevertheless it's fun to swim out to. You get a feeling like you're doing something wrong because you get out past the surf and can no longer touch. I like that feeling of breaking the rules.

By the end of the day we were all exhausted with sand in places we shall not name. 

My trip to Napa and Auburn!

There's a summer storm brewing outside! With wind, thunder, lighting, the whole sha-bang! I love them because I don't have to water my garden but it also means more time inside. I only get so many summer days and sadly this will probably be my last lazy summer. Since I couldn't go outside I decided I would sit down with a glass of wine and reminisce about a wonderful trip I took earlier this summer to visit some friends where there was lots of warm weather.

It started with a very

very

very

early morning drive down the coast to good old LAX!

There was surprisingly little traffic for once. The early morning was well worth the view of the sun rise along the Malibu coast though and I even made my flight with some time to spare! 

I flew Southwest which turned out to be a nice flight. Does anyone watch TLC's "On the Fly"? Well if you haven't the whole show is about Southwest airlines. Sometimes the people are nice and courteous; other times..... well that's another story. Needless to say I was little worried but my flight was great! There was no assigned seating so you got to sit where ever you wanted and no one sat next me so I wasn't crammed into not only a tiny seat but basically on top of someone. 

                                   

         This is what I got along with a Ginger Ale on the plane. I always get Ginger Ale. 

The size of the picture is very deceiving. 

          This won't even feed a bird.

This is what I saw!

The beautiful California Agriculture 

 

California Coast!

I think Los Angeles is beautiful in its own right.

I landed in Napa and wine tasted my ass off! 
For free!
It pays to have connections......No big

Hello gorgeous Napa Valley!

I tasted at Sterling winery, Castello di Amorosa, and Duckhorn.

Wine, Wine, and more Wine!

Did I say wine? The picture above is at Castello Di Amarosa. After a really fun and exclusive tour (my connections at work) of the castle we had a barrel tasting. My first ever barrel tasting! It was with red wine and I'm not the biggest red wine drinker. I know I'm working on it but, I actually really enjoyed it. One thing I learned however was that I am in capable of swirling my wine glass. The wine looks like the high seas when I attempt it. It was quite comical and I stopped immediately because people began to stare. The picture below was at Duckhorn, a beautiful house with a large wrap around porch you sit out and taste at while you look out at their gorgeous gardens. I could have spent all day there even though it was all reds.

This is what happens after you have had multiple glasses of wine:

You act like a fool in highly public place by pretending to be popping out from behind grape vines and stone columns. That's my tour guide by the way. We'll just call her S.T. for all of time. Me and S.T. toured around St. Helena, Calistoga, and the Napa Valley. It was beautiful.

And hot

And you feel even hotter when you're drinking wine. 

Oh hello extremely zoomed in/blurry photo of Chef Michael Chiarello's house! I'm not stalking you I promise!

One night we went to the Calistoga Inn for dinner and drinks. I'm a poor college student so if somethings going to get cut in order to save money it's of course going to be dinner..... Margaritas and Lemon Drops are way more important than real food. Duh! And at least my dinner was fancy. I mean truffle fries is some high end living stuff there. 

Here we are being tourists

                                                                                 And again.........

And...I think you get the picture

This one pretty much sums up our friendship

On our last day in Napa we ate at this one place. Yeah you know that one place. No? Yeah, me neither. I don't remember what it was called but let me tell you it was amazing!

 Isn't your mouth watering just looking at these! These rolls were amazing! They were these dense sourdough roll, coated and sitting in a pool of olive oil and herbs and dusted with Parmesan cheese. Plus its was like  4 bucks for 6 of these things. Such a steal! And they were so good the next day!
They weren't soggy at all.

Then there was this beauty! Caesar salad, fresh cut mozzarella, fresh tomatoes along with an herb drizzle on top of a delicious flat bread! You fold it up and eat it like a sandwich. I could eat this all day every day. And I'd probably weigh 5 million pounds but hey it would at least be from this deliciousness. I can't wait to go back! 

After Napa me and S.T. went to visit our friend, let's call her P, in Auburn. Her family owns the cutest store The Tin Thimble in the coolest building which was an old fruit packing plant. I don't even know how to describe their business. They have everything you would ever need to sew including patterns and adorable fabric! I had to restrain myself from not purchasing a ton of fabric. My suit case already weighed over 45lbs for only 10 days which I could barely lift (I don't know what I packed ok!). Here's a pic of their really adorable and inventive way of displaying buttons!

They also sell hand dyed wool and other handmade goodies. Well, the reason we came to visit our friend P was because she teaches sewing classes there (there are tons of different classes too) and they were having a fashion show! P is an amazing sewer and makes it look effortless.

Here she goes! It was actually very difficult to snap a shot of her on the adorable runway. The whole fashion show was circus themed! These are the only 2 recognizable pics I got.  She made both the dress and the top! You can read her post on the fashion show here!

                          

The fashion show was so adorable! They had little girls show off the clothes they made in their classes. And for lunch her sister made this delicious tomato and cheese tart. I literally ate like half of a tart (which weren't small let me add) and never got a picture of it because every time I thought about it I had already finished. So I would go get another slice and get distracted by how delicious it looked, chow down, and realize I never took a picture. This deliciously vicious cycle continued until I couldn't eat any more and there were no tarts left. 

From there I spent a few days in Chico for the 4th of July. Theres nothing better than BBQ, drinks, and fireworks with some good friends.

Have you gone on any vacations this summer?