My Favorite Day

I've found my new home. It's beautiful - it's smooshed between beautiful ocean beaches and amazing green mountains. It has an amazing coffee shop, "The French Press", owned by a woman named Julia, who is my age my age. It has an amazingly beautiful downtown with cute boutiques and cafes. And it is home. I'm home sick already and I've just left. I'll miss you Santa Barbara, until we meet again. Next time, I'll come with husband too, and he'll fall in love and we'll stay longer. So much longer.

Today was a perfect day. I can't even describe. Kristen has dubbed it the best day of the trip. Even of the days we haven't lived yet, because she said nothing can top the fact that she now owns two surf boards. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

We started in Altadena at Rob and Jenny's house. Last night was relaxing, we sat around with brownies and beers and smoked cloves and I roasted them some 'thank you' coffee for hosting us. We sat out on a small terrace, criss-crossed with lights over under orange trees at a patio table and just talked. It was so relaxing. Then, to top last night, Rob and Jenny played with the kids all morning, and Kristen and I got a great chance to just relax and sip our coffee. We packed up and headed out later than we meant to, and from there we headed into L.A. to the Silver Lake neighborhood Intelligentsia, an incredibly famous cafe that I've wanted to visit for a long time. It was perfect. I had their Black Cat Espresso americano and I bought a bag of Zirikana, Rwanda: Bufcafe - it's described as 'Fruit-forward and sincere, Bufcafe pleases your palate with notes of peach nectar, grapes and a honeyed mouthfeel and a finish of walnuts', and it smells a little like what I imagine heaven must smell like. I feel like a kid with a piece of candy, trying sincerely to have the patience to resist opening it.







Right now, we're driving, and you wouldn't believe the landscape I'm ignoring to write this right now. It looks like a lesser Ireland. A warmer one too. The hills are bright green and rolling and every once and a while there is a tiny cliff off of a hill. And they're dotted and sometimes willed with twisted huge oaks, some of which are covered with a weeping pale green moss. Okay, so I just stopped to take pictures, otherwise, that'd be just teasing you. And for you map junkies, we're just south of Los Alamos, CA.



From Intelligentsia, on Sunset Blvd., we left L.A. due west towards Malibu. It wasn't at all what I expected. You know how stereotypes are so often wrong, well, so is the Malibu stereotype. I mean, I'm sure what you picture of Malibu is there somewhere, but, as we drove in it was just a wall of garages and doors on the seaside with the occasional gap between buildings so that you could see how these narrow houses all had balconies that reached out over the sea. But, for the most part, they weren't pretentious, just very ordinary looking buildings on incredibly expensive little lots of land and over-hanging the ocean. That was on the left. On the right, as we came in, there were just wild hills and cliffs cut out to make room for the road. After a while though the houses got bigger, but, still nothing that shocked me aside from the sheer amount of land some people had and the beautiful landscaping of others.

Then we saw it. A Malibu garage sale. The curiosity was overwhelming, so I swerved across a lane of traffic and turned up a hill to the right and followed it until it grew into morphed into a dirt road and the top of a crest in the hill. We parked on the road and walked up and Kristen's jaw dropped. The guy's land was littered with over a dozen surf boards. I can't remember if I've mentioned it before, but she's a non-surfer surf nut. She's never been, but she reads the magazines, watches the videos and at every opportunity has stopped and gawked, mouth open, at every surf beach we've passed.



The house was a simple, single-wide mobile home on a hill top over-looking the most amazing ocean view. I've never in my life been on a piece of private land with a more beautiful vista. Kristen chatted the guy up about boards and she picked out two thouroghly worn boards that he said were about 15 years old. They weren't any good for actual surfing, but to just own one was enough for Kristen, so she got them to put up on her walls back home in Oklahoma. As he came out to help us strap them up on top of the van I mentioned my coffee roasting. Is it weird that after mentioning I'm from Arkansas that I like to mention that I roast coffee to shatter the stereotypes of others? That piqued his interest and he offered to take some coffee as a partial trade for the boards. The stuff I had in my grinder is nearing it's end, so, since it only takes about 30 minutes to roast a batch, I offered to make some up fresh for him. So I lugged my roaster up to his porch and roasted up a batch of Ethiopia Yirgecheff in the sun overlooking the sea. The kids had a blast running around in the dirt and brush in front of his place while we stood around talking. Toward the end of the roast we found out his name was Dane and he offered us some of his homebrewed beer. Since I was driving and we were taking off soon I declined and Kristen accepted. It was fantastic. I had a sip off of the glass he brought her, and then another sip. He called it an IPA, but it had none of the biter hop taste I normally associate with IPAs, it was smooth and almost fruity. We ended up trading straight up, my coffee for his beer. Greatest trade ever. Thanks Dane :)





We killed way more time than we meant to and after already having a late start we decided to take Dane's advice and go up CA-101 instead of the more windy, scenic CA-1. We left from there and had beautiful ocean panoramas for miles and miles before we hit our mid afternoon lull and started desperately seeking coffee. We were coming up on Santa Barbara and it looked like it'd be big enough to have something worth drinking if we could find the downtown. We took the downtown exit, but most of the shops we could find were closed on Sunday, so, we turned around and headed back a different way. It was a very cute and clean town with an over abundance of 'fresh mexican' restaurants. We finally turned down the right way and stumbled upon State St. which was just an over abundance of cute shops, restaurants and one -perfect- cafe called "The French Press". We got some amazing coffee, and I met the owner, Julia who I chatted up about their roaster, Verve, located in Santa Cruz. We grabbed a few coffees and headed back out on the road.

Beyond having the most amazing view of the ocean most of the way up, the last highlight of our trip on our way to Monterey that night was a stop at "Stagecoach Liquor". It was actually a gas station we stopped at on the way with the low low price of $2.99 - yeesh, I know, but that's LOW in Cali.... They had the widest selection of mircro-brews in the town of Atascadero and I was able to pick up a Chai Cream Beer brewed in local San Luis Obispo and an Anderson Valley Brewing Company Poleko Pale Ale. The cashier at this small stopover was mighty proud of his little shop, and when I told him I was amazed to find such selection at a gas station he replied "We're not -just- a gas station, we're THE Stagecoach". :)

From there we drove through the dark into Monterey and met up with Dad and his friend Herc (well, Bill, but I've always known him as Herc, which is short for Hercules) at the Holiday Inn. Dad had bought us a conjoined room and we put the kids down in one room, cracked the door and enjoyed some wine with the men in the other room. After having some road weary wine, we crashed out hard and fast in our room, ready for the new day...