Nate and Jill's Post-its: Further adventures with friends in SoCal

So we are trying to experience everything that Southern California has to offer before we move to Massachusetts in 3 1/2 weeks. It's funny that we could have both lived here for over 8 years and still not visited all the must-see places.

On Friday we headed out to Venice Beach. I had an appointment with Du Japon Salon to get my hair cut and a wavy perm, but we started out by visiting a funky coffee shop on Abott Kinney Blvd. This coffee shop, Intelligentsia, looks like a modern laboratory. We shared a couple of tasty muffins and a pot of green tea. After breakfast I went to the salon and then we met my high school friend Yuko for a Thai food lunch. Spent a little more time wandering around Venice Beach, amazed by all the medical marijuana shops and the episode of Californication being filmed, and then traveled through crazy traffic to Disneyland. Fun times as usual with Trevor and Leah...we even checked out the newly renovated It's A Small World and watched the fireworks from the Storybookland boat.

On Saturday we woke up early and drove with Byron and Tracy to Ventura. None of us had ever visited the Channel Islands, so we had planned on taking the ferry to Santa Cruz Island for a day of hiking and adventuring. Unfortunately, Tracy had a terrible episode of seasickness on the ferry-ride over. So terrible. We were still able to hike on several trails with gorgeous views of the ocean, cliffs, and wildflowers. These same flowers (we think) gave Nathan and Byron terrible allergies. Nathan 's eyes got all puffy and red, his nose was running out of control, and he had hives all over his neck. We hiked out to Cavern Point and then along the cliffs to Potato Harbor. A tasty sack lunch followed and then we spent the remainder of the day cowering against different cliff-edges along the beach, trying to hide from the freezing wind! The ferry-ride home was fortunately much less eventful for Tracy, but we did see an enormous pod of dolphins and a humpback whale! Rounded out the day with a dinner at The Old Spaghetti Factory (don't get the Chicken Marsala...it sucks...awesome waiter though who didn't charge us for the icky chicken...good customer service and a reminder to ourselves that you should JUST GET SPAGHETTI at a restaurant called "spaghetti factory") haha. Great weekend.