Day 63 Seattle, WA

 

We're finally back home in beautiful Seattle after an incredible, two-month honeymoon! I felt like I needed some closure with this blog though so I decided to post our favorite memories from the trip!

Probably one of my favorite memories of the whole trip: hiking through this beautiful landscape at Glacier National Park when someone started singing "The hills are alive with the sound of music"...

Seeing this guy who looked just like Bryan Weed at Yellowstone!

Getting lost in the deserts of Wyoming and totally losing it for a second...





Exploring the vast, sand dunes at Badlands, pretending we were in Egypt.

Walking around Lake Harriet while Alex was wearing the backpack the wrong way, getting a lot of strange stares.

Laughing a lot with Inna in Chicago!

Getting sprayed by the Niagra Falls with cousins.


Seeing the New York skyline with breathtaking lighting at sunset.

Definitely one of our highlights of the trip!: hanging out with Alexa, Paul, Yan and Val in Boston! We miss them already!

Seeing the Amish! We want to move there! Temporarily..

Making Alex pose for forever so I could get the camera ready to take a picture of us in front of the Washington Monument. Thankfully a nice Asian man saved us a lot of frustration and took the picture for us!

Laughing about this picture of a guy at the Smithsonian who looks just like David Gureivich! 

Lots and lots of karaoke through out the whole trip!!!

 

Pristine, white sandy beaches and warm, tropical water in Panama City, FL! Not to mention a peeling forehead!  

  Experiencing the life and culture of New Orleans with my dad.

Camping at Grand Canyon!

Watching Alex get taken out by huge waves in Malibu.

Conversation of the day in San Fran:

Anja: Excuse me, do you mind taking our picture?

Older Lady: I'd love to! Anything in particular you'd like in the background?

Anja: Umm.. The Bridge.

Older Lady: Oh of course the bridge!

 

Attempting to take jumpy pictures in the Redwood Forests, but realizing that it was way too dark for the shutter speed to be fast enough...

And then finally, singing 'Home' by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, which has pretty much been the song of our trip, at the top of our lungs while driving through Renton and then pulling up into our driveway! Definitely the best way to end our adventure, because home really is wherever we are with each other...

 

 

 

 

Day 61, 62 Redwood Forests, CA, OR

 Our final stop of the trip was to see the redwood forests in California. We actually were driving through them, or at least forests that had huge redwood trees, for a good chunk of the drive up from San Fran to Oregon. This also included the amazing 37- mile long Avenue of the Giants. Now what do you do when you're surrounded by hundreds of years old trees? Climb them of course!

A lot of our time was spent climbing trees and once we got to the actual Redwood National Park, we ditched both the RV and the motorcycle and chose really the only way one should see centuries old forests: on foot. The forest was amazing and we were hiking through it as the sun was setting, so we had some pretty surreal lighting coming in through the trees.
We also found a rundown trail that said it led to an elk prairie, which we never found. And ended up in the middle of the woods with no trail. We did find this huge clump of trees that had grown together though and just looked like the most massive tree ever!

After that we drove up the beautiful coasts of California and Oregon, through a lot more woods, and to my grandma's house... Literally... We spent one final day with my grandparents, doing my favorite things to do with my grandma: sewing and cooking! And then we finally headed home.

Day 60 San Francisco, CA

 

As much as we strongly disliked Los Angeles, we loved San Francisco! This might just be my new favorite city that we've seen on this trip. For starters, their palm trees are actually pretty, unlike the long, skinny, ugly ones in LA. Secondly, the entire city smelled so good! This is pretty rare for a large city, but honestly everywhere we drove it smelled like Eucalyptus! Also the buildings were so beautiful! I think San Francisco has passed Boston as far as character goes.

 

So our tour of the city started with driving through the busiest, craziest street in the whole city, in the RV. We were attempting to find a place to park the RV so we could take the bike out and somehow ended up on the street with all the big shopping stores and office buildings. That was fun. Finally we found a huge park which formerly was a military base, so it had lots of pretty old buildings and big grass plazas. It was a great place to start out our tour.

From there we drove up to see the Golden Gate Bridge and again loved the whole area. Since the park/ former military base reaches out to the water, there is a huge running trail along the water, lots of grass and a beach for swimming. There's also a pier that people were fishing from. Our favorite part was watching this huge pelican waiting for the fishermen to bring up a fish so that he could snatch it from them. So funny!

When my sister got married four years ago, she and her husband came to San Francisco on their honeymoon so they had a lot of excellent suggestions for us to see. One of them was the Ghiradelli Factory! We ate too many free samples of chocolate and mareveled at the mounds of chocolate. We couldn't buy any though because we knew it would be completely melted by the time we got to the RV. We also sat outside and listened to a guy perfrming in the little Ghirardelli plaza. We like supporting local artists so we ended up buying his CD and didn't even realize until later that he's a believer and his music is actually really good! What a blessing!

 

After that we just had to drive down Lombard St., the crazy curved street. It was really fun on the bike, not going to lie, and had a pretty amazing view of the city below us. There were at least 50 people along or at the bottom of the road taking pictures of it and I felt like a celebrity with paparazzi all around us photographing us coming down!

From there we drove over to the Coit Tower which really has the best view of the city. It was completely worth the ridiculous price of 7 dollars just to go up a little elevator to the top. I love that almost all the buildings in San Fran are white. It's really beautiful and makes amazing pictures of the city. The view of the Bridge was pretty spectacular too.

We had one last stop we had to make after that. My brother-in-law, knowing how much I enjoy a well made cup of coffee, insisted we go to Blue Bottle Coffee. There are actually four of them in the city so we went to the closest one which was in one of the big ferry buildings along the water.

Now this ferry building was pretty much the coolest place in the world! As soon as you walk in, you are met with that amazing Barnes & Noble smell of new books and coffee, along with this amazing melted cheese smell. Besides a fancy restaurant, the building is basically a high class, indoor market. They had everything from farm fresh vegetables to incredibly delicious baked goods to soaps to plants to rare cheeses and a lot more. And of course the amazing coffee shop. This was no dirty, fish smelling Pike Place Market. This was like the 5th Ave of food!

It reminded me of when I lived on the Campo de' Fiori in Rome where you could walk downstairs and buy fresh bread, vegetables picked that morning and eggs that still had feathers on them all within a half a mile radius. Amazing! I could have stayed there all day! After buying this melted cheese sandwich with apple chutney that was way too good, some pastries and coffee of course, we went right outside the building to the deck overlooking the ocean and just sat there enjoying San Francisco...

Also, we came super close to getting our first parking ticket on the whole trip. Right when we got back to our bike, a parking security lady was turning into the lot we parked in to give us a ticket. As my dad would say: close but no cigar! We then sped off back to the RV, literally flying up the crazy steep hills of San Francisco. I have to say that those streets were the funnest streets I've ever ridden on. They were so steep in some parts that I had to hold on to Alex really tight to not slide off the bike. And then once we reached the top of the steep hill, we would literally ramp onto the street, flying through the air for a second or two. So Fun!!!

 

 

Day 59 Malibu, CA

As soon as we left LA we started enjoying California a lot more! We took the Highway 1 and drove along the coast. It was so beautiful! During the night the water looked so inviting with the full moon shining off of the waves and the next morning while driving to Malibu we were completely in awe of the huge waves and had to stop and watch all the surfers.




The beach at Malibu was huge and decently clean. There are enough volleyball nets on every beach to host the Summer Olympics and of course the best part was the waves!




We spent the majority of our time battling the waves and trying to not get knocked over by them. We also got to witness a Baywatch moment when some guy got carried out by a wave and in one really slick motion, the lifeguard dove into the water, swam out to him and then carried him back to shore. Everyone cheered for him of course and after that the lifeguard wouldn't let anyone, including Alex, get out too far anymore.





I've heard that you learn a lot about your spouse the first year you're married. I had my first experience of this when we were at the laundromat in Santa Barbara that evening. Now I know that Alex can't wash his own clothes, but I had no idea that he literally has no idea how to fold clothes either. Now since I know this will be hard to believe, I have proof.

Day 58 Los Angeles, CA

 

From the Grand Canyon, we drove through the Mojave Desert, over these beautiful mountains and straight to Los Angeles.

I'm pretty sure LA was our least favorite stop on our entire trip. There was nothing enjoyable about Hollywood. Sunset Blvd was a dump. The Walk of Fame was dirty and there were homeless people sleeping on the stars. Beverly Hills wasn't special at all.

I had the worst Starbucks experience I've ever had in my life. And after working there three years, I was about to call Uncle Howie and demand these workers be fired. It was that bad! The Hollywood sign is super small and it takes forever to even find it. Not to mention it's not even lit up at night so I didn't get a decent picture of it. In-n-Out was totally overrated and didn't even taste good. Basically the best part of the city was this guy walking around dressed as Darth Vader.

And then just when we were completely fed up with the city, we got lost and ended up at this observatory completely by accident. And it was amazing! It completely redeemed the city. Overlooking all of LA and more, the views are extraordinary and apparently it's the hang out spot of choice for all LAians on Friday nights. There were huge lines just to get to the top of this hill. Of course being on the bike, we got to pass all of them and get a parking spot at the very top.

As we were walking to the observatory there were families having picnics on the grass, college students playing Frisbee, researchers with telescopes looking at the moon and every photographer in the city perched on the different balconies taking pictures. If I lived there I would definitely be there every Friday night. My pictures don't do the view justice at all either. The whole city was lit up with golden lights that twinkled. It was breathtaking!