Weekend Recap: House Hunt & Hiking

This weekend was dedicated to house-hunting, which meant spending the equivalent of one and a half work days doing the following: 1) making lists of places the met our criteria: 2 bedrooms, 2 baths, no upstairs/downstairs neighbors; 2) making what felt like dozens of phone calls; 3) driving the least efficient, most zig-zaggy route possible to view five different places; 4) filling out three and a half applications (we're still working on the one that's approximately 4 pages long). Joe's mom was nice enough to come with us, and along the way we stopped off at Lemonade for some sustenance:

All that house-hunting effort, and we still don't know where we'll be living in a month. Thankfully Sunday was more play, less work. We started off with our new post-Hawaii Sunday ritual of breakfast at home and some lazy time, followed by a hike. This week we were exploring the Santa Monica Mountains, which turned out to cover a lot more area than we realized. According to the internet, one in seventeen Americans lives within a one hour drive of the Santa Monica Mountains. Since we were actually hoping to hike somewhere near Santa Monica, we chose the Will Rogers State Park in Pacific Palisades.

Compared with Runyon Canyon, Will Rogers Park is a lot more scenic, less-crowded, has better parking (though they charge $12 in the lot, but there was plenty of street parking), the trail is wider, and because of the proximity to the ocean and shaded trails, it's a lot cooler. All in all, it was a great day with lots of photo ops:

Bee on a Flower - a brave shot for Joe

 

30 Weeks Pregnant - only 10 to go!!!

little boxes on a hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky...

Not sure what those rainbow streaks are, but I kinda like 'em

 

 

After the hike it was time to time to refuel at Greens Up. I think the last time I went there was after a workout with Joe that involved me running up a hill with weights in my back pack (pre-pregnancy). It's a build your own salad place and their serving sizes are HUGE. They give you an industrial-size mixing bowl full of all kinds of fresh, organic ingredients. Joe got the Thai salad with tofu, and I went for the spa salad, which has lots of fruits, spinach, almonds, and an apple dressing:

1. Breakfast: Scrambled eggs with spinach, fruit salad, & veggie pigs in a blanket

2. Iced tea & strawberry lemonade at Greens Up

3. Giant salad at Greens Up

4. Menchie's Fro-Yo for dessert

Mmmm, getting hungry just looking at that. After that it was on to the second part of our new Sunday ritual: errands, chores, and relaxing. By the end of the day I was just under 15,000 steps. Joe says the steep parts of our hike really counted as 25 steps each though, so by his calculations I'm probably closer to 17,000 steps.