A Southern Journey

I knew I missed The South when we moved back a year or so ago, but I just didn’t know how much. Most days, I miss The West and I don’t even realize how lucky I am to be able to live back here. But there are weekend trips now and again that we take that remind me of precisely this blessing.

If this month would have a nickname, it would be “Food”. Seriously, all we did was spend exorbitant amounts of money on foods pretty much every other day. I am always of the belief that food is not only good or worth exploring only because you pay hundreds of dollars for a bit of it – on the contrary. The most delicious food, I think, is the most primitive, the simplest, cooked in small corners of the world, in the most unexpected, least equipped kitchens. We didn’t seek the extra expensive food. It kind of found us, through chance and some little planning. It is a big month of celebration for personal reasons for us, so I guess it kind of went with the times.

Food is a great excuse to travel. And although food takes us places, we never stop just at that. We try to take the entire place in and experience the most that it has to offer.

A Short Trip to Kinston, NC

First, we spent a day and a night in Kinston, NC. I wrote before that I love taking trips to places that people would ask “Why in the world would you go there?!” about. Kinston might be such a place. I am sure many people have never heard of it, even if they lived in North Carolina for a while. It is in the Eastern part of the state, where rivers run wide and the barbecue sauce has no tomato in it, like God intended!

Some of our friends put together a pilgrimage trip to the Chef and the Farmer restaurant which is featured on a PBS show of some fame, A Chef’s Life. The owner of the restaurant, Vivian Howard, is also the star of that show, giving people a peek into Southern cooking, Eastern Carolina style.

We first stopped at our hotel, a former bank nowadays called The O’Neil, across the street from the restaurant. The hotel is a turn of the (20^th) century former bank. The lobby has antique details, an amazingly ornate plaster ceiling, an enormous vault turned into a bar and luxurious seating behind former teller windows. The hotel only has seven rooms, and each room has a unique personality. We had another couple of friends staying at the hotel who were in a Chinese-motived room, while ours had an English hunting cottage feel.

The Farmers & Merchants Bank in Kinston, NC, now The O'Neil (hotel)

This is how you know this is a small town: we asked the front desk lady if it’s OK to park on the street, on the side of the hotel because we could see no signs for parking. She said, in the most endearing Southern drawl: “Oh, mah goodnesshyeah! You surely can park just about anywear … You see some signs in the street clearly sayin’ ‘No Parking’, but don’t pay them no mind!” She peeked through the window behind her desk and pointed at the cars parked across the street: “You see them cars over there? It saiz ‘No parking’ right there, but they’re parked right under the sign. No one will tow you. Kinston police don’t care. They have bigger fish to fry, I reckon!” – she ended with a shrug. We were wondering about them big fish and what they were. Hmm …

The lobby at The O'Neil - with the ornate plaster ceiling and the giant vault

The place was brimming with hospitality. The front desk lady was nice and helpful, and if you can tell from my retelling the parking story, very welcoming. The vault, like I mentioned, is turned into a giant beer and wine cooler, with a self-serve bar where they invite you to partake of snacks, cookies, fruit, water, beer, wine, or coffee at any hour of the day and night. The cleaning ladies wished us a good weekend when we left, and asked us how our stay had been as if we were old friends. The hotel, like the whole town, really, was quiet. We did feel like maybe we and our friends might have been the only guests that day.

To wait for the rest of our friends to get to town for our planned dinner, we went to Mother Earth Brewing – a brewery, as you might have guessed which was about a block and a half away from our hotel. You really cannot get lost in this downtown. Everything you need to see or do is right there, in a 200 yard square, just about. Some of our friends who had checked into the hotel earlier than us noticed that the lead singer in the band at the brewery was also the front desk person who welcomed them at The O’Neil earlier. It’s all in the family, you see.

After our refreshments at the brewery, we headed towards our destination – Chef and the Farmer.  We were seated in a private room, because of the size of our group – about 16. Between all of us we ordered just about every appetizer on the menu. Because of my weird diet, they had to mash two of their entrees into one – I got the grilled red snapper on top of the sweet potato skins and everything was delicious. The portion sizes were decent, unlike some of the really “fancy” restaurants that skimp on the quantity on the account of presentation and flavor. In this place, each dish had everything: presentation, flavor, uniqueness, and size to please you. The cocktails and the desserts were unique and delicious as well.

The red snapper and sweet potato skins with mushrooms at Chef and The Farmer

The following morning, we headed for brunch at Boiler Room Oyster Bar, a restaurant owned by the same people as Chef and the Farmer. Again – all in the family here. I guess this is not as famous as the fancy restaurant we had dinner in, nor nearly as expensive, but like I said before: it’s not all on the price tag. In fact, the lunch I had at The Boiler Room was in some ways more surprising and more delicious than Chef and the Farmer, especially in its simplicity. I believe half of our group had the butter bean burger, me included. Just as plain as simple as it sounds: a patty made of butter beans and I am not sure what else. But I am sure it had a mix of love, and mystery, a Southern blessing, and a splash of good luck to make it extra special. It was deep fried instead of grilled, and my goodness, was that the best veggie burger my mouth has ever tasted?! It was tasty and as soft as butter melting in your mouth. They did ensure me there won’t be any butter nor mayo, nor eggs, either, in it – and still, it was amazingly delicious: the right measure of savory, salty, crunchy, buttery, melty... You would think people went there for the oysters, but think again – like I said: about 8 people out of our 16 got that burger, vegetarians, vegans, and meat eaters alike and we all loved it.

I hope I’ll travel many a places in my life, but that butter bean burger, I tell you what – won’t leave my memory any time soon.

We strolled the city after our brunch and visited The CSS Neusse – a real-life replica of a Civil War boat -, the local coffee shop, and just walked the streets of downtown Kinston. It’s a sleepy town, with stores open but quiet, and not much foot traffic. One of our friends said “there is nothing in this town but drunk foodies.” We chuckled because we surely recognized all of us in that description.

The CSS Neusse
Click the picture to browse through the Kinston, NC album from this trip

 

Continuing the Journey Through Charleston, SC

Following our weekend in Kinston, NC, we had a weekend planned for Charleston, SC. Now, I won't repeat every truism that was ever said about Charleston. I am sure those of you who visited it know all about why it’s amazing, and those of you who have not have read about it too: the gem of The South, the beauty, the Civil War-era historic hub, the home of Rhett Butler, the “civilization gone with the wind” are just some of those things mentioned about it.  

I usually go to Charleston to slow down and sip the past just like you would a hot cup of mint tea. The aroma of the place seeps into your pores and takes over the body and the mind like a mist. There are many the things you can do in Charleston. So many, there is never a good plan for it, because there is no human way to pack everything there is to do in one weekend!

We settled for strolling Meeting and Market Streets downtown, and looking at the street artists in the City Market while hunting for pralines and a place to eat really good seafood. This was the first night.

The next day, because we had a whole day, we drove to Magnolia plantation, a place that has belonged to the same family since 1600’s (started with The Drayton Family). The plantation home has been rebuilt several times since the first foundation was laid down, and today it’s more like three or four houses and multiple additions put together rather than one cohesive building, although it surely does look like one. The grounds of the former plantation were the star of this show, however. After losing all the money they had in the Civil War, like most landowners in The South, the owner of the plantation decided to open the grounds as a garden, and they remain opened this way today.

The home at the Magnolia Plantation

What's a Southern home without a peacock on the front lawn?! 

The gardens are a scrapbook of forests, pastures, marshes, lakes, all along the Ashley River. They are only very subtly human-touched; they are mostly left to the devices of the subtropical Southern vegetation to shape it in the most wild fashion. The trails are graveled, but crooked and winding through overgrown areas. Azaleas, camelias and Spanish moss brush your face as you squeeze yourself through the many narrow pathways and trails. While admiring the beauty of the trees, bushes, and flowers (all in bloom, it seemed just for us, as this was April, one of the most flora-rich times of the year in The South), we were watchfully crossing bridges over ponds and estuaries of the Ashley river on the lookout for alligators. I was watching the trees for snakes, too, but I figured with that many vines, it would be impossible to tell which one was a snake and which was a vine. The alligators did not let themselves waited for for too long. They were shamelessly swimming around, undisturbed, it seemed, by the sizable crowds of visitors.

I love visiting old Southern homes, because you see America’s history rolling right in front of your very eyes in the stories they amount inside those walls, in the pictures, décor, books. All its glories, and shadows, all the ghosts, and belles of the past, all carefully and elegantly tucked inside the grand staircased foyers and plantation shutters …

Alligator at the Magnolia Plantation

For dinner, we found a treat of a place called Hanks, close to our hotel not far from The City Market. The food here was a little too overpriced for what it was, but the cocktail I had (it was a locally inspired one), called Colonial Daiquiri (rum based) was divine! I also loved their special salad which had the most enormous shrimp (sized more like lobster than shrimp), arugula, and roasted potatoes (I kid you not!) in a roasted tomatillo vinaigrette. Holy salad gods! I still don’t think it was worth the almost $20 it cost, but it was memorable. Maybe not quite as amazing as that butter bean burger in Kinston – but still something to definitely remember.

Walking the streets of Charleston is really my favorite thing to do down there: shooting the beautiful doorways, people watching around the Waterfront Park and the Pineapple Fountain, hearing the giggles of college girls taking selfies at The Rainbow Row, watching people line up for food at Blossom, Magnolia’s, or Hyman’s – all color the Charleston experience in its own unique way. This is a town encapsulating so much history within its brick walls and cobblestone streets like a snow globe: you shake it and another memory forms – all real, all old, and yet right in front of your eyes.

Charleston entry way

There is a smell about Charleston that stays with you: it’s a mix of sea and mold, a mixture of uncured antiques and jasmine or some other bloom.

The Pineapple Fountain at Waterfront Park

We picked funky-named places, with hippie or Southern names to have breakfast in both days we were there. We figured how could we go wrong with such choice deliberation?! On the first morning we were there, we went to Another Broken Egg (their crab cakes are so fresh you’d think they reached out into the waterfront for the crabs right then and there), and Page’s Okra Grill in Mount Pleasant, the second day. That place is a zoo. Not sure how the wait staff doesn’t turn postal on people – there is not one revolving door of many people queued up to get in but two of them – one through the front of the store and one through the back patio. With all this apparent commotion, the staff never misses a beat: good ol’ Southern hospitality is at home here. Their breakfast potatoes are to kill for!

Rainbow Row

The last day, we drove across the many bridges around Charleston in look for an islandscape we could shoot. We ended up on Sullivan’s Island for a short hike and a peek at the ocean. Again, we were mindful of alligators and snakes, but luckily found neither one that day. Crossing over the dunes onto the beach was like seeing one of those multi-commercialized prints all the hotels down the beach hang in their bedrooms: water brush swinging in the wind, sand blowing at an angle, with seagulls diving in the horizon, where it meets the water … Idyllic and peaceful comes to mind, if you think the beach is peaceful.

The beach at Sullivan's Island

While we chased all these treasures, and all the history and the tastes of The South, during both trips we got lost on ancient (for America) streets lined with magnolias, live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. There was not even a hint of a breeze in the branches. The trees and the houses with old fences and gates were silent, sleepy, immersed in a slumber of centuries. The thing I missed the most about The South is just The South … The old homes, with wrap-around porches and the big columns in front, the pineapple details on the front staircases, the narrow streets with even narrower, uneven sidewalks. The awkward, cluttered layout of an old city that ran out of room for new homes. The smell of mold and dampness, the humidity in the air that makes my hair feel like it was dipped in molasses. I missed all that, down to the sweaty skin I get when walking around the honey-like air … The buttery taste of food from people who know how to use butter and a fryer. I must have been born in The South at some point in the past. If not that, then I am not sure what ghost lives inside my chest, because for sure it does, as it always understands this song …

Whether food called us out to the road, or  whether we just found it looking for some other treasures is irrelevant. Dipping ourselves into the past and into our surrounds for a spell is always a treasure, no matter the pretense. This weekend, I found out that The South is still here and has waited for me, patiently, unchanged, for the nine years I have been gone. There is something to be said for timelessness and eternity – and The South surely knows a thing or three about those …  

  

Timeless Charleston, SC
Click the picture to browse the entire album from this trip

Finding Appalachia

If you drive North from where we are on I-77 and then some other such direction on another interstate or highway you find yourself crossing three states (North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia) and ending up in Ohio.

Athens, OH is an old college town, a hippy town, an artsy town, just to name a couple of things. All this, and much more I cannot even think to enumerate. Our friend who invited us up has referred to it as a town “nestled at the foot of Appalachia” for years now. I always found this space poetic, sort of unreal, like this might be a mythical place in a fictional book, but not in real life. But Appalachia is real.

I have heard before that this region is usually associated with extreme poverty, but also hardworking and resourceful people, outlaws as much as talented artists. I guess as a passer-by, it is hard to see all of these in just a couple of days. There is certainly a sense of poverty in the poor roads of West Virginia (which we crossed on our way up), and in the leaning, one-pump gas stations of West Virginia and Ohio. But Athens is an old Southern town (I know, Southern!), with lots of charm, and lots of personality.

Street art in Athens, OH

Ohio University sits at its center and it sort of defines its vibe: students, youth, quirky professors, bespectacled and rosy cheeked, mixing with students on a Friday night at the local pubs.

Ohio University campus entry

Our friends took us on a tour and we found some treasures, like fine local beers (pretty much anywhere – this town is made of beer, really), great, very diverse food (my favorites were Thai Paradise, as well as Salaam, both downtown), Artifacts Gallery is a quirky little gift store, where you can buy your patchouli incense, as well as your cheeky gifts for that crazy aunt who is a tad too hard to shop for, otherwise. The homemade chips and the blackening seasoning on the tilapia at Eclipse Company Store were out of this world! The setting of this place was amazing, as well – just an old, tall farmhouse turned into a brewpub, in the heart of an old neighborhood, with hiking trails and forests all around …

The blackened tilapia sandwich at Eclipse Company Store

We strolled the university grounds, and we visited some of the areas of the art and visual design schools. The staff at West End Cider House is bar none the best staff we have experienced in a while: they are friendly without being overbearing, knowledgeable, and very open-minded in trying mixed drinks their drunk customers want to experiment with but which are not on the menu. And drunk people (we) can come up with some cocktail doozies. Like Imperial Stout aged in whiskey barrels mixed with Grand Marnier, or Baileys. They did not even blink and made them for us. Or rather, provided the ingredients for us to mix.

The cucumber ale at West End Cider House is by far much more delicious than it sounds. Perfect for a hot summer evening! 

We were there during Ohio Brew Week, so every bar had a special beer menu to honor that. I have not seen this many craft beer options in my entire life: every bar had many (20 – 40 - 100 - lost count) options for craft beers, and most of them were different from one bar to another. I left thinking that for sure this town is made of beer. Do you remember that song that goes something like this: “And the little streams of alcohol/ Come a-trickling down the rocks.../ And a lake of stew/ And of whiskey, too/ You can paddle all around in a big canoe ...” - well, you might as well paraphrase that song and make it about Athens, OH: “And the little streams of beer/ Come a-trickling down the rocks/ And a lake of stew/ And of beer, too/ You can paddle all around in a big canoe ... ...”. I believe that original song might have been written somewhere in or about the Appalachia, too.

Reminder on our friend's refrigerator

The bars we hopped had pretty much everything else (wine, liquor, cider), but everyone seemed to be enjoying the beer: the festival and the sweltering, humid summer weather probably called for this.

If you want to experience a hippy vibe in one place, have breakfast or lunch at Village Bakery. Our friend kept telling us this is “quintessential Athens”. They lost our order, and after waiting for more than hour and finally asking about it, they admitted to that and started from scratch without much blinking, really … Easy going, and unfrilled is how I would describe that experience. There was no point letting your blood pressure raise at that moment. The kids took care of it in their due time. Like many other mountain towns, time is trickling here, and not flowing nor rushing like in the big cities.

Local woodworking and homemade goods for sale at Village Bakery

We visited the Kennedy Museum of Art which is housed in a former lunatic asylum. I am sure this is not PC anymore, but this is what they told us in there. Today's museum is not very good, but the grounds are beautiful, albeit haunting. I wished they would have done something with just sharing the grounds, the history of the place itself, the stories, the history of medicine through a place like that with the visitors. But maybe some other day …

The Kennedy Museum of Art

Athens is a happening city which comes alive at night. Even during the day, the pubs are not empty. The town is small and comfortable, with one way streets, brick roads, and historic buildings bordering the sidewalks. The mountains are right there, behind every hotel, home, store … you can almost touch them.

Old wooden floors and brick walls that could tell a story, in a beer store in Athens, OH

I would love to go back in the fall when hopefully the heat might let up and I could take in some trails for a hike or twelve. The leaves would be gorgeous, I bet.

If I were to pick just one word to describe Athens, it would be artistic. The craft beer, and craft pretty much anything, the banjo playing, the homemade brewing, the people experimenting with canning and commercializing little known fruits, like paw-paw, the art school, the old buildings left untouched, the old brick walls and streets tell an artful story of pure Americana. I think in the middle of all this I might have found that that mythical Appalachia is alive, well, and surprisingly real, after all.

More street art in Athens, OH. Click the image to see the full album from this trip. 

On Mushrooms

"On mushrooms?!" - you'll say. And I'd respond: "Why, yes, yes, on mushrooms, 'cause why the heck not?!" Aren't you tired of politics? I don't care what continent you live on right now, you must be weary of this political stage the world is keeping us on nowadays.

So, we'll talk about mushrooms today just to change things up.

A couple of years back, I went to a Kathy Griffin stand-up show. As usual, it was hysterical, but aside from that, she told a story about she and Cher, the legend. Apparently they are good friends and one night Kathy was visiting Cher and they got hungry. So Kathy told Cher to order a pizza. Allegedly, Cher asked: "I don't know how pizza happens, Kathy! How does pizza happen?!"

And that bit just stuck with me.

Last week, I bought this huge carton of mini portobello mushrooms and I was washing them in a pot, in the sink. I know Rachel Ray tells you to never wash mushrooms, but just to brush them with a wet paper towel, but I don't buy that. I wash mushrooms the same way I have washed them ever since I was 6 years old and I picked them in the woods myself. 

 

My American 'convenience' mushrooms

Washing that huge pot of mushrooms in my sink took me right back to the days when my sister and I came home from a whole day in the woods with bags full of mushrooms (most of them looked like mini portobellos ). Washing the mushrooms was us, kids', job. We had to put them in buckets and sink them in water – they don't really sink, the suckers, they mostly float. But what that does is make the dirt and the pine needles float, as well, so you can scoop that out.

Washing mushrooms is a thankless job, because you never feel like they are ever clean. All those little folds under the hat are full of dirt and needles and they stay pretty much that way, regardless of your efforts. You can change the water in the pot 100 times, and I guarantee you that you'd still have dirt floating at the top.

For a moment there, I relived so many wonderful childhood memories. My sister and I and all of our friends, wandering the woods of Northern Carpathians in search of mushrooms. The smell of the woods came back to me. The slopes, steep with almost no trails. The sore calves trying to stay up-right and trying not to squish the bag full of mushrooms under us, when we did fall on our butts. The smell of sweat in the summer crisp mountain air. The sting of the bug bites we got and the acid burn of the cuts we got while making our way through the brush.

The sharp pain shooting straight into our brains from the freezing mountain stream water pouring over our hands as we were washing the mushrooms when we got home. We would run our fingers through the mushrooms in the ice cold water to make the dirt come off of them. The voice of the parents threatening us that there won't be no dinner if they'd found one spec of dirt in the mushrooms before they'd cook them for us. The weight of the stack of wood we would bring from the shed to make the fire to cook them on the stove.

This was more than a childhood adventure, this was our dinner. We would have gone to bed with milk and a moldy piece of bread if we didn't bring home mushrooms or berries from the woods. Trust me: we knew how mushrooms happened! In dark woods, in the shade (they love shade), sometimes under roots and moss, this is where they love to grow. The darker, the better and the bigger mushrooms. With lots of help and lots of work to bring them home, get them cleaned and then cooked. This is how mushrooms happen.

Although we were kids, we knew the good ones from the "crazy" ones (the ones that make you crazy, not the ones that behave crazy). We also knew the different tastes – the yellow, small ones were sweet and full of flavor, but you had to find tons of them to make a meal and they are not easy to find. The mini portobellos were the easiest to find, and the huge portobellos close to impossible. Dry years were the worst, because they hate drought. It gave us purpose, and knowledge into the way the world works, something that kids nowadays ... well, don't get me started.

Now, 30 some years later, in my kitchen, I was wondering as I was cleaning and cutting these beauties for my dinner: "I wonder if kids nowadays know how mushrooms happen?! I wonder if they just think Costco makes them." They probably do.

To this day, mushrooms in gravy and garlic sauce is one of my favorite meals. And every time I make it, I relive those far away days when my sister and I would scour for food. I am grateful for such simple memories for they are anything but simple.

The Streets of ... San Diego

There are a couple of obvious things that would make San Diego a favorite destination for me, like the fact that it’s only an hour and 24 minute plane trip away from my home airport, or the fact that almost always it will be warmer than where I live. Or the fact that it’s in California, which is my one of my favorite states to travel to for healthy, un-messed-with food and good libations. But there are some other things that I discovered about the San Diego area that make it interesting as well. Things you don’t know about. Unless you go.

Here is my list of things that I have learned to appreciate about this Southern Californian city, as well as some things that kind of left me “blah”.

1.0   The vegetation throughout the city:

I remember when I asked a co-worker native of San Diego what is the vegetation like down there, and she said “kind of like a desert”. Well, she was only half right, in my opinion. It’s “desert meets lush green, Hawaii tropical meets Arizona cactus”, if you can imagine that. Either way, it’s beautiful, as these next shots hopefully show it. 

Various vegetation around our hotel, on the streets of San Diego

2.0   The Gaslamp Quarter:

I was afraid that the Gaslamp Quarter would be overrated, a bit, and that, in my opinion, it was. It’s a hopping place of open air bars and patios, souvenir shops and much construction, with Happy Hour menus, it seems, around the clock, and drunk smells (alcohol and throw-up alike) everywhere. The history is still there (its development started in the late 1800’s, so most of the architecture reflects that time), but it’s been swallowed by the urbanism of today and the attraction of bars, entertainment and random shops and contemporary murals.

San Diego has a feeling of big, dirty city, with bad roads, and limited parking. At least the parking was affordable, just a couple of bucks for a couple of hours, but harder to find. It overwhelmed more than it welcomed you. As you know, I am already a fan of bigger cities with a small town feel, like Montreal or Denver. This was different – more along the lines of San Francisco, Seattle, even Boston or New York (overlooking the scale, of course). Just not my … glass of wine, you know … 

 

Snapshots around the Gaslapm Quarter

Street corner in the Gaslamp Quarter

 

The dirt of a big city

 

San Diego downtown street

               Reminders of the "hippie" generation in the Gaslamp Quarter murals

3.0   The Bay:

On the way from the Downtown/ Gaslamp Quarter towards our hotel, in Point Loma, we passed by the San Diego Bay. Although the feel of the large, swallowing city remains, the views of the water and of the Marina are beautiful, and the silhouette of the city across the street from the boats is majestic. We caught some beautiful glimpses of the sunset resting in the water from this stretch of the road. 

 

The San Diego Bay in the sunset

4.0   Point Loma neighborhood:

This is where our hotel was – in the same area as the airport. Being this close to a loud and busy airport usually bothers me, but people build right, I guess, in this town, because I could not hear the planes from our hotel at all. And the neighborhood across the street from me was amazing! A contemporary mix of single homes and townhomes, most of them in Spanish “hacienda” style, with just enough green space to make it fresh and not too much to overwhelm the homeowners with landscape chores. It had a vibrant air of posh but affordable, quiet and hip, wild and well kept, all at the same time. I joke with my husband and I say that I want to retire there, when I am all done with my job. Yeah, “when” is another question. 

Neighborhood interior court in Point Loma

5.0   Torrey Pines State Reserve around the La Jolla region:

Just a short ride of maybe 30 minutes up the Pacific Coast, from San Diego, through the La Jolla region, will take you to the Torrey Pines Reserve. It has everything you’d normally expect from a State Park, well marked trails, lots of open beaches to walk, run, feed the seagulls or shoot the waves at your heart’s content. It also has very well marked vegetation, a visitors’ center and very limited parking, too. It’s here that I met the California I was always dreaming about and seeing in movies: to the right, you have the mighty Pacific Ocean, to the left you have the rocky mountain slopes. 

 

The beautiful vistas at Torrey Pines Reserve

The pine trees on The Reserve

 

Desert meets flowers on the Pacific Shore. 

 

On the way back towards San Diego, we stopped at Iris, this pub where we had the best fresh calamari with some home made aioli and cocktail sauce to kill for– some of the best snacks we had while down there. The restaurant was on the edge of Los Peñasquitos Lagoon, a coastal waterway filled with egrets and more seagulls and other water creatures – just a beautiful view off of our patio, and more photo ops for us, of course. 

The yummy calamari at Iris's

Egret on the Los Peñasquitos Lagoon

6.0   The puppies, the kitties and the wild parrots, too:

We have been to cities that are dog friendly before (like Denver, Vail, Park City and Seattle). But we have not seen anything quite like San Diego yet! There are dogs and cats virtually everywhere, and I don’t mean the stray kind. People here love to dress up their dog, and restaurant websites even advertise that they are “dog friendly” on their sites. We also saw a wild parrot around our hotel, as a local told us quite matter-of-factly that “oh, yeah, we have a couple of resident wild parrots here, in Point Loma.” And they were not quiet, either. 

 

The creatures of the streets of San Diego ....

 

7.0   The food

As we normally expect from any place in California, the food was overall above average. Everything was a bit higher (price wise) than what we are used to, but everything was delicious, fresh and definitely unique. We ate on patios most times, as the weather was gorgeous for this time of the year (late February). There are several options in specific menus for vegetarian and vegan foods, right along with the best seafood and pizza in town. We went to a “hippy” café (The Naked Café) for breakfast one morning and that had this vegan wrap with a side of quinoa that I loved … I know, I know: it’s not breakfast food, but it was so fresh and plenty that I didn’t care. It gave me the energy I needed for the day. And where else in Utah can I get quinoa for breakfast, right?!

Dinner at Anthony’s Fish Grotto on The Bay was amazing! Funny how I live in the mountains, but I had to fly all the way to California, on the Ocean, to have some decent trout! Anthony’s does have the best views of the sunset from their dining room, so if you’re into that, definitely check them out! 

 

The "made to order" (otherwise non-) vegan flat bread at Oggi's

 

The "quinoa" breakfast at The Naked Cafe

 

Street food: Pretzels and veggies with cheese dip and hot mustard at Barley Mash in the Gaslamp Quarter

 

A more traditional "American" breakfast at Crest Cafe, one of Guy Fieri's picks

8.0   The Pacific Ocean:

My favorite element from this trip was the proximity to the Ocean – which is why I booked this trip to begin with! Call me crazy, but I have to see The Ocean, any ocean, at least once a year every year or else I am losing my gourd, more than usual.  After living on The Atlantic in my past, and having seen The Pacific three times so far, in my life, I can tell you the latter is my favorite. The color is a peaceful blue, and it’s quieter, more patient, and more “friendly”. Definitely less angry than its East Coast brother. 

9.0   The history:

If you’re a history buff, then San Diego has a lot to offer, for a relatively young city. Spanish and Mexican history and architecture meet American South West. It is also a modern military base, so lots of recent history reminders greet you at every place. We visited the USS Midway, a massive aircraft carrier, anchored in the San Diego Bay. Right next to it, the Unconditional Surrender Statue greets the ships entering the Bay. You’ll love picking apart the architectural styles of the Old City and of Balboa Park as well. 

 

The USS Midway Memorial

The statue of The Unconditional Surrender

10.0 And that brings me, finally, to my favorite escape: Balboa Park.  There is everything for everyone there: there are beautifully landscaped gardens, gorgeous statues, and ornate architecture, a massive outdoor organ, a large pavilion hosting orchids and other tropical plants, there are birds of every color, beautiful trees, bushes and plants at every corner, open door amphitheaters, and fountains, and countless museums for every taste or hobby. We never did make it to the Zoo, but there is that as well, and from what we read, it is extensive. We visited the Photography Museum, the Japanese Gardens and the Orchid Exhibit at the Pavilion. 

 

The entrance at Balboa Park

 

Architectural detail at Balboa Park

 

Orchid at Balboa Park

 

The gardens pavilion at Balboa Park

 

 

The Bonsai Garden at Balboa Park 

 

The Japanese Gardens at Balboa Park

 

The outdoor organ amphitheater at Balboa Park

 

More architectural detail at Balboa Park

Overall, we had a great trip and San Diego offered us that busy and relaxing getaway that we were hoping for: we chilled, and ate, and learned some new things to widen our minds. We will probably go back, but we’re not in a rush. We’re open to other Western (and not only) hidden gems, first, speaking for both of us, I think.