Swanton Berry Farm

I had heard from friends about the variety of local farms that offer pick-your-own fruit and was dying to do it myself. Step one was deciding what fruit I wanted. We're lucky to live in a region that has just about every fruit you could want, fresh and ready to pick. I decided on strawberries. Next I chose the place, Swanton Berry Farm in Davenport, CA because it's on the coast and also because they are organic. The last step was to make a call to my friend Megan who I knew would love to check it out with us.

We picked up Megan and her hubby, Todd, on Saturday morning to join us. The strawberries were amazingly fun and easy to pick. I had imagined it being a hunt of reaching into bushes to try and find a ripe berry that was suitable to pick, and it being a long process to find the amount I was wanting to bring home with me. Instead, the strawberry plants were in raised rows and the dirt was covered in plastic. The strawberries grow and lie on the plastic, so the ripe ones are easily identified.

This picture cracks me up. It is reminiscent of one of my favorite King of Queens episodes where Doug and Carrie are given a terrible painting of themselves as a gift. Doug has beaver teeth and Carrie has a huge hand. Lesson learned... Keep my strawberry-chowing hand far enough away from the camera lens to help it look not-so-enormous.

Carrie: Look at this. I got one tiny arm and one huge arm.

Doug: I think it's just the angle.

Carrie: Doug, look at my hands. That's a chicken foot and that's a catcher's mitt, are you serious?

Show clip can be seen here.

We picked our way up and down a few rows until we had enough to take home with us (and we may or may not have done a bit of taste-testing in the fields!). The guys were nice enough to carry our boxes while Megan and I went to town pulling off the ripe berries. The view of the coast from the fields was so beautiful. But being along the coast also meant battling with the wind (excuse the windblown hair in the pictures)! When we were finished, we walked up to the store, weighed our delicious treasure, and paid the honor till. Yep, you pay and make your own change. We sampled some of the farm's jellies and jams and looked at the amazing homemade baked goods. I couldn't resist getting a strawberry truffle. It was incredible!

We headed back to the car and decided that, although Swanton Farms had other U-Pick stands up the coast (olallieberries, blackberries, and kiwi), we wanted to continue on to Pescadero and stop in Harley Goat Farm for some goat cheese. Megan and Todd had not yet been to Harley's, so we were psyched to show them this little piece of heaven! We munched on some goat cheese and bread and then were ready to head back to the city.

Andy and I didn't do anything creative with our strawberries. We loved them so much just the way they were that we only accompanied them with some homemade whipped cream. Megan and Todd resorted to making these drinks.

Hopefully there will be another fruit picking date to happen shortly in the future! Maybe cherries or peaches?!

Big Sur Camping (Last Weekend, Part 1)

Last weekend was pretty busy so we're going to break it down into two parts. On Friday we drove down to Big Sur, one of our favorite places in this area. The views of the coast are just amazing. It was pretty foggy on Friday (late afternoon-ish) so we didn't bother stopping to take any pictures and instead drove straight to Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park. Andrew set up the tent while I sat out our camping chairs. The guy is a pro at it so I leave it to him because I usually just end up getting in the way. And he did really have it up in the time it took me to set out chairs and put on my tennis shoes. We threw our stuff in the tent and drove over to Pfeiffer Beach. We hadn't been before but had heard of its purple sand which gets its color from the surrounding rocks. On our visit we only saw a few patches of sand with a light purple hue. We later found out that the sand gets darker the further north on the beach you go, where the following photo from LA Times Travel was taken:

Image source here.

Our photos show a much more "normal" color sand:

We left before sunset and went back to the campground and biked for awhile. Then Andrew built a fire where we sat the rest of the evening.

  

We woke up early the next morning, tore down our site, and stopped to get pictures as we left beautiful Big Sur.

Ever seen the "Happy Cows Come from California" ads? I believe it!

Then we drove onto Castroville, where the 53rd annual Artichoke Festival was taking place. Last year we just happened to stumble upon the festival when we were visiting Santa Cruz/Monterey/Big Sur. You can read about that trip here.

 

We walked around and checked out the vendors, then hopped back in the car with our freshly fried donuts and kettle corn (how I love fair food!) and drove back to San Jose. We were back in time to take a quick nap to energize us for our next big adventure this weekend...stay tuned for Timko Weekend Part 2!

Año Nuevo State Park: Seal Breeding Extravaganza

On Saturday we drove to Pescadero, CA for a guided tour of the elephant seals on the shores of Año Nuevo State Park. I had heard about the tours from a California guide book and had bought tickets a couple months back and, animal lover that I am, was pretty excited for this day to come.

The tour was led by a very informative docent who told us anything a person could ever want to know about elephant seals. The shore of Año Nuevo is the largest mainland breeding colony in the world for the seals and for three months of the year they have tours so you can witness these amazing creatures up close.

From mid-December through mid-January, pregnant females arrive on shore from months out at sea eating and plumping themselves for delivery and nursing. They will give birth and nurse their babies (seal pups are called weaners) until their pup has put on 300 pounds. The males arrive in the meantime and battle other males for breeding access to the lady seals. Once the pup is weaned, the female will mate and go off to sea to repeat the process all over again. The weaners stay on the shore until March, when they go off to sea.

There were several things I thought were sad about the lives of seals (especially female seals). If you were a seal, you'd lead a solitary life alone at sea with virtually no interaction with others. Can you imagine being alone 500 feet down in the cold, dark ocean while watching your back for sharks? Then you make the looong journey to shore to have your baby where you must fast for 5 weeks. But that's not the worst part about your time at shore. The biggest bummer is that there are giant (3-4 times your weight) horny males who try to hop on for a ride before you've even given birth! You have to fight to get the blubbery blobs off of you. And you have to watch them fight and bark at each other to prove who the better man is to mate with you. You go through childbirth by yourself and only get to spend one month with your new sweet pup before it's time for that male with the big head to jump aboard and have his way. Then you return to sea to gorge yourself for the next birth. See. Super depressing, huh? I'm so glad I'm human!

The tour was a 3 mile walk where we came really close to these two:

Remember when I was talking about those amorous hefty males? Let's watch one in action, shall we?

She managed to break free! And this is how we left the unhappy couple. Doesn't it look like her big brown eyes are pleading, "Don't leave me here with this big galoot. Save me!" Poor girl. Here's a couple more big guys laying in the sand along our walk down to the beach:

Check out that schnoz! The males develop those trunk-like noses with age.

Do you see the babies?!

Before we headed home we stopped at Harley Goat Farm (read a previous post here about this amazing place!) for a visit to their cheese shop. Yum!

Perhaps I Watch Too Much TV

And movies, too. Read on and you'll see what I mean. This weekend we set out for another camping adventure. We stayed in Sonoma County's Austin Creek State Recreation Area. That wasn't our intended camping location, however. Allow me to start at the beginning...

We first had reservations to stay at a campground just south of Austin Creek. We headed out early on Friday afternoon in an attempt to avoid the bay area traffic. Insert the wah-wah sound here. We are learning that it really doesn't matter what time you travel around here; Interstate driving is always sucky (yeah, that's about the best adjective I could find to describe it). So here's a picture to put to how the drive felt:

It took us almost 4 hours to get to our first destination (a trip we intended to do in under 2). But the traffic wasn't the only thing to blame. We actually missed our exit and managed to take the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, adding time and a toll to our trip that we really didn't want. The only good part about the unexpected detour was our ride across the Golden Gate Bridge. Any time I'm in San Francisco or think about the Golden Gate Bridge the Full House theme song starts playing in my head (you've seen this before in this post). And so I couldn't help pulling out my phone and playing the song from You Tube as we crossed over into Sausalito.

Oddly enough, our 4 hour trip seemed more grueling than the 40 hour drive from Panama City Beach to San Jose. Anyway, when we got to the campground where we had a reservation, we decided there was no way we could stay there. In fact, we peeled out of their parking lot so quickly that I didn't even have time to snap a photo. Picture an entire RV park of Cousin Eddie's. Then visualize our "campsite" being just an extension of the playground full of Cousin Eddie's offspring. So off we were to find another location.

Thankfully we found Austin Creek State Recreation Area about 15 miles north. This place had the campy feel we were looking for (read: no Cousin Eddies or even an RV in sight). Plus it was tucked in a redwood grove. We did all of our normal camping things: hiked around, built a fire, played cards, etc...

Among the Redwoods

The next day we headed to the town of Guerneville and walked around and down to the Russian River. We also went to the Sonoma Coast State Beach and Goat Rock Beach, where the final scene of one of my favorite movies, The Goonies, was filmed. It was a normal foggy day on the Pacific coast, so it was just like in the movie. It had me breaking out all kinds of Goonies one liners like "Goonies never say die" and "Heeey, You Guuuys!!" and "Rocky... Roooad?" The rocks along the coast were really amazing and while I kept expecting to see the pirate ship sail out from behind them, sadly, it never happened.

 Our Pic

 Movie Scene

 Our Pic

Movie Scene

 My favorite love seen ever in a movie.

We spent Sunday again at Niles Park. Hazel enjoyed the lake and we laid on our blanket and read. We came home and watched another great episode of Entourage. There are only 6 left until the series ends. That will be a very sad day.

Cousin Eddie, Goonie, and Entourage images found here, here, here, and here.