Day 8: Good-bye San Diego (we love you!)

Today we manifested another 75 and sunny day-- just order it up and the universe provides, or so it seems. We started out the day at another health food store to replace what the silly birds took away yesterday. Then off to the the Healing Arts School in Pacific Beach for delicious massages done by massage students (in other words, cheap and good). After a fabulous hour each of all the road kinks being worked out, we emerged ready for our next adventure: finding huntington beach. We had decided to get a bit north today to make tomorrow's drive not so long, and we had missed meeting up with Sabrina's friend Rebecca who lives in Huntington Beach (just south of LA) on the way down, so we decided to drive up there for the rest of the afternoon.

First we stopped at the San Diego Veteran's Hospital, site of the San Diego dietetic internship. The cafeteria was nothing exciting-- far too much fried chicken in our opinions, but otherwise perfectly nice (though the security was very tight-- we had to show ID and got interrogated about our purposes there before entering).

After that quick detour we of course got confused going to Huntington Beach since we don't have a map of that area and had to backtrack a bit before finding it. It was definitely worth the drive! The beach was magnificent. The water was a stunning blue and the temperature was perfect. We spent two hours lying in the sun and we did not want to leave when our parking meter was up. Next we walked around town, mostly killing time until rush hour was over and stumbled upon a fantastic farmer's market. They had the most delicious berries that you could smell from 10 feet away. Rebecca came to meet us at the market after she got off work and we had fun discovering that she has many of the same nutritional obsessions we do, such as weird fermenting projects on her kitchen counter and juicing up a storm, so we had fun exchanging ideas. (I would just like to add for the benefit of Scott, Rebecca's husband, that she is not weird, just from Seattle. Trust us).

We had yummy roasted corn at the farmer's market for dinner and Laura got carried away with the cayenne pepper and practically burned her mouth off, but it was really good just the same. We posed for pictures with Rebecca and with a kitty that was randomly on the side of the road (they really do follow us everywhere). Then it was on the road again.

We had a goal of making it to Bakersfield tonight, which we have re-named stinkyfield/smellyfield/nastyfield (our personal favorite) because it smells VERY strongly of manure here. VERY strongly. It took longer than we thought to get here because we had to go over some "mountains" which by Washington standards are more of hills, but it was steep for awhile and slowed us down. Then, we could not for the life of us find the damn econolodge. We tend to pick the hardest to find motel in town-- which is probably why they are cheap, because no one can find them. (We also had the same problem in SD and in fact there, never found the econolodge and gave up because we were so tired).

We got to our motel after 10pm again where we had quite a hike from the car to the room with all our gear. We bought a bag of avocados at Trader Joes in Seattle and still haven't used them and they are very ripe, so we made guacamole in the hotel room, which we realize is very weird, but we are willing to accept that. Surprisingly Laura is pretty sure it's the best guac she has ever made. It was very delicious, and not just because we were starving. We finished our "meal" with berries from the farmer's market that all fell out of their little boxes and are now a mess in the bag, but still taste good. Tomorrow is an all driving day so hopefully we will have some fun adventures to tell.