daily slice-of-life photo blog of a Gen-X dad
Merry Christmas everyone! 🎅🎄☃️🎁
Tonight we ate our traditional Hawaiian feast: lau lau, kalua pig, dried fish, lomi salmon, mac salad, char siu, poké, and musubi. This meal is one of the highlights of my year! I hope you also enjoyed a nice Christmas dinner with your loved ones. ❤️💚
Hello! Happy Christmas eve! This evening we went out for dinner at Din Tai Fung, which is a popular Taiwanese restaurant. The dumplings were so good!
This location we went to was at the Del Amo Fashion Center, which is the mall that we always used to go to when I was growing up since it was only a few minutes away. But nowadays, so much has changed that I hardly recognize it! But, I’m glad that this restaurant is there. 😄
Earlier in the day, I went with my mom to King’s Hawaiian Bakery to pick up a cake for Christmas day. It was super-crowded, but they had plenty of cakes to go around. Can’t wait to dig into the Haupia cake tomorrow!
I hope you had a nice day!
おやすみ
こんばんは。
Today we headed down the coast to Big Sur for breakfast at Big Sur Bakery. The scenery along PCH was breathtaking, and because of the road closure farther down the coast, the traffic was very light. When we arrived at the bakery, there were only a couple of others there so it was a relaxed and carefree meal.
After fueling up our bodies with coffee and pastries, we drove back up the coast to Monterey, then across to the highway and on to our next stop, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. We wanted to check out the campus, but since it was holiday break, the school was empty and the buildings were locked. So we walked around a bit before continuing our journey back to Southern California. But it was neat to finally see the campus where I almost went to school back in the ’90s.
My brother and his fiancee were having an ugly sweater party, so we went straight there, ate dinner, and partied for a bit before returning to my parents’ house in Torrance.
It was a long day, but filled with cool sights, tasty treats, and fun times. The best kind of travel!
おやすみ！
こんばんは。How’s it going?
Today we grabbed a quick breakfast at the hotel then headed down to Cannery Row and the main attraction: the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
We had been once before when the kids were small and enjoyed it a lot, so we wanted to visit again and experience the aquarium now that the kids are older. The aquarium is still the same, which is a good thing. The exhibits are all excellent, with the otter feeding and kelp forest feeding being very popular and fun. But I had never seen the feeding at the Open Ocean exhibit, which has tuna, sunfish, a sea turtle, sardines, etc. It was amazing to see how fast the sunfish could actually swim. When the food was thrown into the tank, that sunfish zipped across at lightning speed! It was incredible!
The feeding of the 20,000 sardines was fantastic as well. The giant mass of silvery fish rose like a hurricane to the food and with the sunlight coming down from above, the sight was truly dazzling. I think that was the highlight of the visit for me. Really awesome.
In the evening we visited the Dali museum for a bit and checked out the extensive collection of lithographs. Some were beautiful, and some were bizarre. Very Dali!
I hope you had a nice day.
またね～
こんばんは。How’s it going?
Today we drove up north to being a three-day trip to Monterey. It takes about 6 hours to travel by car from Torrance, but it’s a very scenic drive, and we stopped at a couple really cool places along the way.
In Santa Barbara we had a nice lunch at The Shop Kitchen, which is a cool cafe/restaurant attached to a auto-shop. Our avocado toast, chilaquiles, and salmon eggs benedict were delicious, and I sipped on the cold-brew coffee on the drive up to Paso Robles. But before hitting the highway again, we stopped at Renaud’s Patisserie for some snacks and gifts.
Our next stop was Paso Robles, to visit Sculpterra Winery for a tasting and shopping. It is a pretty cool winery with lots of sculptures to look at in the garden, and a yummy wine-tasting.
After that, we drove straight up to Monterey, and had a somewhat disappointing seafood dinner before finding our way to the hotel where we conked out big-time. It was a long drive, but we’re thankful to make it safely and we’re excited for tomorrow!
おやすみ
