I, blog

I’ve leaving for a sweet trip to Israel tomorrow! We’re going to be pretty busy in the next 10 days:

• Exploring Jerusalem & Tel Aviv
• Camel riding and camping in the Negev desert
• Swimming in the Dead Sea

I’ll be out of Twitter, Facebook and blog range but the tour guides are going to keep the group blog up to date: http://www.israelwithisraelis.com/blogs/sh-21-308

Winter break is behind me and it was fantastic! My family (parents + brother) met me in Los Angeles and we did the tourist route:

• Hollywood, Bel Air, etc
• Tour of rich folks’ homes
• Polluted beaches
• Universal Studios

We all, no offense to the 8M victims, decided we weren’t huge fans of the city. Things got way more fun the moment we left.

Instead of flying, we drove up to San Jose via CA-1/101. It was a gorgeous route that took us along the Pacific and well worth the extra time over the faster, inland option. Along the way, we stopped at San Luis Obispo, located about halfway between LA and SF. SLO is the site of CalPoly and IMHO it’s the coolest college town. These kids better know how lucky they are. SLO is located along a beautiful stretch of ocean, has awesome mountains and hiking trails surrounding it and had a really slick, laid back and hip atmosphere. I’ll make sure to come back here sometime soon.

Once we got to the Bay, we covered more territory in the next 5 days than I have in the last 4 months of living here:

• Awesome bus tour of San Francisco showed me places in the city I had never heard of before and can’t wait to visit again.
• Drove over the Golden Gate Bridge and hiked in Sausalito and Point Reyes nothern of San Francisco. I’m really pumped about taking my bike over the bridge once I’m settled into my new apartment and visiting these places again. They were gorgeous!
• Tasted amazing wine at Napa Valley in five really cool wineries. It was really fun and as snarky as this sounds, I’m hopefully that my days of Two Buck Chuck are behind me.
• We celebrated New Years Eve with a delicious dinner in San Francisco right along the edge of the water at a fantastic seafood restaurant.
• Finally, capped off the week by enjoyed the beaches at Half Moon Bay near San Francisco and Santa Cruz south of San Jose.

It was 13 degrees in Chicago when my parents got home and I felt really bad for them! To add injury to insult, the first day back at work we played Ultimate in our shorts and tshirts.

The verdict is in: NorCal FTW!