Grace Unforfeited: Vacation Remix

Last month I was totally privileged (I never spell that word right on the first try) to go on an amazing vacation with one of my best friends. She lives in Australia, so I hardly ever get to see her, but she was in Canada for work so we met up in San Francisco for a week of fun before she headed back down under.

Day 1: Meet up at the airport where we're both totally exhausted. Cassi from teaching for an intense 2 weeks and me from going to a support raising boot camp for work, then heading directly to the Avengers (totally worth it), and then packing, and then sleeping 4 hours, and then feeding the worms and the cats (dark shed with 1000 worms at 5 am - not my fave), and then driving to MARTA.

We got a great deal at the Intercontinental downtown and had fun shopping, walking around the city, eating sushi, sour dough, and cookies.

Day 2: We packed up the car and had a great brunch at a local place before heading on up the coast to Bodega Bay.

Super Yummy Brunch

View from the rocking chairs at our Bodega Bay resort

Taking break from reading on the rocking chairs

Dessert at the hotel that night

Day 3: We had a very leisurely morning, set out and found a few vineyards and did a bit of tasting, came back and got a warm shell (think hot stone) massage at the spa, had dinner and started the nightly S'mores ritual. It was Cassi's first time to have S'mores!

Starting the fire

We found our own sticks (by poking around in their landscaping)

Day 4: After a few false starts, we finally made our way to Bodega Head where we walked along the cliffs of the coastline and looked for whales making the migration back up to Alaska. We saw some right after we got out of the car, then we walked up and back, stopping along the way to look for more, splitting the ocean in half to have a keener view, and of course, didn't see any more whales until we returned to the parking lot. Gorgeous view, though!!

View up the coast

Ready to look for whales

Along the path

So, so pretty

And, of course, we stopped for more wine tasting on the way home. This is called a wine surf.

Sunset from our hotel

No day was complete without S'mores!!! Way to take advantage of a room with a fireplace!!

Day 5: Today we got up and headed off to Armstrong Nature Reserve (or something like that) to look at the Sequoias. They were amazing!!! And, of course, there was an obligatory stop off at a couple of vineyards on the way home. And then we went back to try out the warm shell massages for a second time.

It's a long way to the top of these trees.

Getting ready for our last night of S'mores!!

Day 6: It was time to end our vacation and head back to San Francisco. We decided to take the scenic route along the coast back. It was beautiful, but maybe not the best idea for 2 girls who both get carsick. At one point, after driving on curvy twisty roads for well over an hour, a road crewman told us to take a detour. I felt sick, Cassi had to pee, we were almost out of gas, I was trying to navigate off my phone, and the worker told us there no "close" gas stations - it wasn't pretty! Fortunately, we found a town within a few miles and then were back on the sweet, sweet freeway.