Could a trip be any more complicated?

Jeebus! We finally made it home - a day late and about $400 in the hole. Apparently, if you miss your first flight on Alaska Airlines, they cancel the rest of your reservation - without telling you. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, a warning to you - I've loaded some pics on here, so the loading time might be a little slow if you're on a dial-up connection.

On Thursday, the fam loaded into the car and headed south down to Big Sur, which was, to say the least, epic. It definitely rates in the top 5 most beautiful spots I've ever been (nothing has come close, however, to displacing the San Juan Islands from #1). We spent a nice time taking a short hike to a gorgeous headland and had a lovely lunch at a little cafe among the redwoods.

The wee wobs and I high above the sea...


Smelling the flowers...

Check out how groovy his pants look in that pic. It's like the digicam took some mushrooms!

On the way back from Big Sur, wee wobs fell asleep in the car. Since it's next to impossible to move him without waking up (and staying awake), we opted to drive on the Monterey Peninsula's "17 Mile Drive" through Pebble Beach and around back through Pacific Grove and Monterey. Really, all I wanted was the TV money shot of the finishing holes on Pebble Beach (golf afficianados know what I'm talking about). However, that shot is obstructed by multi-million dollar homes who (I shit you not) put up fences so you can't see their million dollar view! To add insult to injury, they charge you $8.75 for the privilege of driving past their house which has the view that you aren't allowed to see. In fact, for most of that drive, you're not allowed to really do much of anything except marvel at how the ultra-rich are able to spend their money building homes that are probably occupied two weeks out of the year, but obstruct your enjoyment of an incredibly scenic shoreline. Jerks. It relieved me to get back to the modest millionaires in Monterey.

On Friday, we bid farewell to the father-in-law (a part of the trip which went far better than we could have planned). We drove north and hung out in Santa Cruz for a good chunk of the day. Uh... hello trendy. After that, we took a rather circuitous route back to San Jose that led us through some gorgeous mountains and redwood groves and through La Honda, which literary afficianado's will recognize as the one-time home of Ken Kesey, described in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and which looks exactly as I imagined when I first read Wolfe's narrative). Friday night we spent the night in a hotel overrun by pre-pubescent tap dancers who made it impossible to enjoy a beer while getting a rundown of the week's European football highlights.

On Saturday - April Fools, mind you - we awoke at 3:30 in the morning to make our flight back to PDX, only to find that because we missed our first flight, our return trip had been automatically cancelled. We fumbled around (it was 5:30 AM, mind you) trying to find a way back, only to find that our only option was a flight the next day. We scrambled to get a place to stay (the hotel we stayed at was nice enough to give us our room back and give us another day at the same rate as before) and another car. We slept for most of the morning, had some great Ethiopian food for lunch, and took wee wobs on his first carousel ride...

Notice that wee wobs still has lunch in his mouth two freaking hours later. He refused to swallow or spit it out until about two minutes after that picture was taken, when he spit the food, and two hours worth of saliva, all over my shirt. Fabulous.

That night, ms. wobs and I decided to have dinner in the hotels highly regarded restaurant. Great food, waaaaaay too spendy for a grad student and his teetering on the verge of unemployed adjunct faculty member wife, but if you're gonna go for broke, go for fucking broke, eh? We got to have some fantastic wine, and I ended the evening with a scotch and a Guinness.

So we finally straggled in today. And that's what I did for Spring Break.