Warning: inane content ahead.  It is a journal of what we did while on vacation.  It is not particularly well-written, and should you decide to read it, you will likely experience an overwhelming sense of boredom similar to watching someone else’s home videos.  Proceed with caution.

Time to go home.  After packing up, we headed off to breakfast at the Home Style Café.  Man, are those good eats.  I had Linguica, eggs, potatoes, and biscuits.  Oh man, it’s good stuff.  For you Woodlanders out there, I’d say it’s as good as, if not better than, breakfast at the Ranch Kitchen.

http://www.homestylecafe.com/

After breakfast and a quick Starbucks break, we headed north out of Fort Bragg to see the redwoods.  There is some beautiful coast line up there, and the redwoods are spectacular.

We paid the $5 to drive through the “Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree,” one of the most underwhelming experiences of my life.  We drove out the other side, looked at each other and said, “yay.”  Yes.  A lowercase yay.

We made it all the way up to Garberville before turning around and heading for home.  Benbow looks like a nice area, but it’s a bit remote.  Hopefully someday we’ll get back up there again.  It’s pretty nice country.

T-man was great throughout the whole trip.  He spent a lot of time in his car seat, but he didn’t complain a bit.  He was a little fussy at night, but we think that it was because he was out of his element.  Hopefully things will return to normal this week.

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If you’ve made it this far, I commend you.  Also, you are a masochist, but, hey, if it was worth it, who am I to judge?

Warning: inane content ahead.  It is a journal of what we did while on vacation.  It is not particularly well-written, and should you decide to read it, you will likely experience an overwhelming sense of boredom similar to watching someone else’s home videos.  Proceed with caution.

Yet another Starbucks run.  Today we didn’t have much on the agenda, so after a big breakfast, we just kind of lazed around the house all morning.

Earlier in the week, I had found out about the “World’s Largest Salmon BBQ”, to be held today at Noyo Harbor in Fort Bragg.  So, we went.  And, it was awesome.

http://www.salmonrestoration.com/bbqmain.html

Turns out it’s a fundraiser for some salmon restoration organization.  Lots of people showed up.  There were easily a couple hundred while we were there, and I imagine several thousand make their way through over the course of the day.  They had a live band, great weather, and, of course, great food.

Each ticket bought you a plate with a huge salmon steak, an ear of corn, two thickly-coated pieces of garlic bread, and a tasty green salad.  The outdoors, community atmosphere and the great food made it an extremely enjoyable experience for our whole family – even Troy.  If you’re ever in this neck of the woods around the 4th of July, I highly recommend stopping by the annual salmon BBQ.

Next up was the wedding at the Mendocino Woodland’s camp.  Deidre’s husband-to-be was apparently a camp counselor here for 17 years, so this place had special meaning to them.  It is the most remote setting for a wedding that I have ever attended, but it was beautiful.  The only sketchy part was the ¼ mile trek from the parking lot to the ceremony site, but in the end, we all survived.

Probably the highlight of my evening was having the four cousins (me, Darci, Cinnamon, and Deidre) together again.  I have no clue the last time that happened.  It was great to catch up with the side of the family that we rarely get to see.

Also cool: my Uncle Steve received a Nikon D80 for xmas, just like me.

We had to leave the reception fairly early because they had no lights and open flames weren’t allowed, and Troy was getting fussy.  We headed into Fort Bragg to get some dessert snacks since we missed out on the wedding cake.  On the way back to the house from Safeway, we got stuck in traffic from people leaving the beach fireworks show.  Let me just tell you that the Fort Bragg Police Department is a bunch of Super Troopers.  Someone from the NYPD needs to do a work exchange program and show them how to direct traffic.  The FBPD, bless their law-enforcing hearts, are borderline retarded in this aspect of their jobs.

Anywho, we all crashed pretty much as soon as we got home.

Warning: inane content ahead.  It is a journal of what we did while on vacation.  It is not particularly well-written, and should you decide to read it, you will likely experience an overwhelming sense of boredom similar to watching someone else’s home videos.  Proceed with caution.

Woke up this morning to see this:

We’re both early risers now thanks to Troy: Kelly gets up early to feed him, and I get up so I can be at work by 7am, and back at home by 4pm.  This morning, after we fed T-man and made a Starbucks run, we decided to take Troy for his first-ever beach experience.

The ocean didn’t phase him at all.  We stuck his feet in the cold water, and he didn’t even flinch.  What a tough guy.  Also, notice how he is much more stylishly dressed than his father.  Show off.

Just as we started to head back to the house, Troy got a little fussy, so we decided to relax for the rest of the morning until Darci showed up.

After Darci unpacked, we all headed down to Mendocino to do a little window shopping.  It’s a definite tourist trap, full of stores that sell so much crap that you wonder how they could ever stay in business.  The only store that caught my eye was a gallery that sells art that “makes you laugh.”  Whenever I make it big, I’m going to go buy this guy out.  Some of his paintings had me cracking up.  You can see some of his work here:

http://www.leedyart.com/

After tooling around for about an hour, we headed back to the house and had a huge feast, featuring BBQ steaks.  The nice owners graciously provided a Weber charcoal grill for our use, and man, were those steaks good.