Monterey Weekend

It's a beautiful, crisp, sunny day with the flavor of autumn in the air. I can't tell you how lovely it is to have light streaming through the windows and no heat!

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This weekend we meandered down to Monterey on Highway 1, along the coast from Half Moon Bay, stopping in Santa Cruz for lunch at Erik's Deli.

Monterey is a special place to us; we became engaged there in March 2006. Saturday afternoon was spent at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We both love the aquarium and its temporary and permanent exhibits. The jellyfish exhibits are always a favorite, we can stare at these amazing creatures for a long time.

A special exhibit of seahorses was pretty amazing too- these are babies.

These may look like sea plants but no- they are seahorses too!

I also got to experience an extra treat- visiting every single bathroom in the aquarium. Awesome.

Saturday night we had a nice dinner at The Whaling Station off Cannery Row. The meal was excellent. (save for the spill I nearly took on the way in the restaurant. I went down on one knee and Ray caught me, though about 20 people saw and it was quite embarassing) We shared some gnocchi and Dutch apple pie, with prime rib for him and wild salmon for me.

Our hotel room was quite lovely, but I slept badly in the strange bed with an inferior pillow and the room was too warm for me. The next morning we went to breakfast at First Awakenings, where we've eaten on every trip we've taken to Monterey.

Sleepy-eyed me, enjoying my decaf coffee.

I am nuts about the pancakes at First Awakenings. They make amazing apple cinnamon oatmeal ones from scratch, with nice chunks of apple. Ray likes their raspberry granola cakes. But they are HUGE and I forgot this so I ordered too many! Two to eat and one to go, I would have been better off ordering one to eat and one to go. As it was I ended up taking almost two whole pancakes to go.

I brought the rest home and froze a good portion. They will be a nice and easy treat to pull out in the coming months.

We drove home shortly after, in time for the really heavy rain that we'd avoided thus far. We spent the rest of the day laying around, watching football and knitting.

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