Festival of colours

We’ve all seen that advert by Sony where the couple get involved in a paint throwing festival in India, or probably a spread in National Geographic about the Hindu celebration or you may even have a friend who headed east to find themselves and got caught up in the mix.

For me I always thought it looked so much fun but a trip to India was not an immediate priority having just moved countries and dealt with all that. I plan on leaving those far off destinations until I am a little more of a seasoned traveler, I wouldn’t want to go all that way and miss something!

Luckily for me a US company hosts their very own Holi festivals all over the country, they have yoga tents, DJs, Hare Krishna chantings and amazing food to fill your time between the hourly paint throwing. The festival is a family friendly event, they have a strict no drugs, no drink, no smoking, policy which I loved! And unlike most festivals, despite growing in popularity, these guys haven’t upped their prices, they haven’t used their name to attract bigger names or changed their core values. It’s a fun, family day out, reasonably priced (all in it cost us $13 a head) with a great atmosphere.

The festival ran 11am-5pm, we arrived at noon and bought our paint packets and the throwing began.
They have an hourly mass throwing where everyone counts down and throws at everyone and the sky, although to be honest I preferred to watch this from afar more than be in the thick of it. I mean I’ve dealt with mosh pits since the tender age of 13 so the crowd didn’t scare me – this one was far nicer than a bunch of hardcore kids, it was just so pretty to see the puffs of neon paint fly up into the bright blue sky.

We three paint on each other, on strangers passing by, and were attacked by the groups of children running wild and free. But no one did it aggressively. I felt like a hippy in the 60s, all peach and love, baby!

We left the festival after about two hours. Rus, his sister Kellie and I are all whiter than the driven snow and being out in the sun is a dangerous hobby of ours. But we’d seen all the clothing tents, we’d eaten some fabulous vegan food, we’d chatted to the holistic therapists and got well and truly covered head to toe in a rainbow of colours.

The paint is a powder paint, on the website it suggests shaking your clothing free of as much paint powder as possible prior to washing to avoid staining which is what it does when wet. The only problem is you can’t help but sweat in the heat of the day and purple armpits at the gym certainly receives attention!  

And can we all just take a moment to appreciate my husbands beard…

 

Queen’s Bakery – A review

One of the main things I miss about the UK is the food – the price, the ingredients, the availability, the quality, the taste. Just everything. So every time I see an attempt at British style food, be it fish and chips offered on the menu, a cadbury chocolate bar, an Irish themed pub (I know Southern Ireland isn’t politically British anymore but geographically it’s the same land, the same food grown, the same love for potatoes).

Some experiences have been amazing, we visited Dublin4 and had the most amazing meal there, some have been pleasantly surprising, I was not expecting Red Robin to provide such perfect fish n chips and some are down right disappointing.

I had one such experience at Queen’s Bakery this weekend.

I saw a ‘groupon’ for high tea for two at the Queens Bakery and got really excited. I looked on their website to see what sort of place it was, trendy and stylish offering delicious sounding (and looking) cakes and treats. I’ll be honest, I didn’t research too thoroughly. They’re taking the Queen’s name, that cannot be done in vain, so it must be bloody brilliant, it was a $20 offer and how hard can tea and sandwiches be?!

Well, if you’re a Southern Californian resident apparently it’s really hard. I blame it on the lack of decent bread, y’all don’t understand how good a simple sandwich can really be!

We walked in and I was immediately disappointed. What looked online like luxurious yet quirky decor was cheap and poorly finished, Queen Elizaebeth I’s portraits were wonkily framed cheap Ikea frames, the back wall was covered in a bad silver wallpaper job, the pink paint was tired and badly cut in and there were more tables than they really had room for.

But that’s just decor, their tea list was quite impressive.
I chose Earl Grey, Rus opted for a strawberry green tea. Our tea arrived first – with no milk, no sugar, no lemon, no honey. No NOTHING. Please do not limit my options and assume how I should drink my tea. That is not your job.
The milk, sugar and honey were all brought for us, upon request, along with two scones. Two blueberry scones served with strawberry jam and cream, no butter, and the cream was squirted out of a can.
Yes, squirty cream on a scone.
I understand clotted cream cannot be purchased here, but it is not hard to whip some double cream. It is just as simple to add some vanilla and make yourself some Chantilly cream.
The scones were okay, but small and flat, very hard on the outside with just a little bit of soft fluffy doughy goodness on the inside.
In fact they weren’t really scones at all, rather half-set shortbread biscuits lavishly sprinkled with crystallised sugar.

Next came the sandwich course, because everyone starts with a sweet prior to the sandwich. We had not been given a choice of sandwich, we were not asked a bread preference nor for any dietary requirements. We were just given eight sandwiches with four different fillings.
First we had tuna fish, quite a common sandwich filling the world over. For some reason the kind people at Queen’s Bakery had opted for forgo the ever popular mayonnaise that usually accompanies it and instead chopped up chillies to for the odd spicey bite. Each served on a quarter of a brown, slightly stale, bap.
Next was pureéd spinach with something the waitress couldn’t pronounce or didn’t want us knowing about so muttered. On white bread, crusts cut off of course because this is a sophisticated affair despite what the cheap pink walls say.
Thirdly we had cream cheese and cucumber. Again on white, no crust, bread. This was actually their one winning sandwich if only they had their ratio right! The cream cheese was spread thick, while the cucumber was thinly sliced so much so that it was more an essence of cucumber than a hearty crunch of the good stuff. Cream cheese is perhaps the only cheese this country does well. I’m not sure if Queens Bakery just buy an awful off-brand of if all cream cheese tastes so awful when served at room temperature. Living in a country where good hard cheese is so readily available and not obscenely priced I am not yet a connoisseur of cream cheese.
The last sandwich on our platter was a nutella sandwich, served on brown crustless bread, with some sort of nut-shaving to give the nutella extra crunch. Because there’s nothing worse than smooth nutella…? I love nutella, I plan on buying some for Pancake day this evening. But there is a time and a place for all things, and high tea is neither for nutella. But I’ll admit it was the only sandwich I could stomach on the entire plate.

Dear Queens Bakery, please invest in some ham, egg, mature cheddar, hell even jam for your sandwiches!!

Finally we made it to the dessert course. Even though we had technically started with it with our scones, we got some cakes to end on too. We had two bite sized brownies, two bite sized cupcakes and two cookie baskets filled with coffee buttermargarine-cream frosting filling. Also bite sized.
The cakes were okay. They were grey, they were mid ground, they were miles from the delicious pastries and cakes I can buy for less than £1 at my local bakery back home. After the awful sandwich course I was mainly just happy that they had made standard cakes and not decided to pureé anything.

We were just wondering about tip-protocol when something awful happened, nay two awful things happened.
Normally Rus leaves tipping to me. In the UK we do not tip all servers, it is not a career choice it’s a part time job for students – for the most part. A tip is commonly left but it is not a percentage of the bill, it is not dictated on the receipt what should be given, it is a ‘thank you for going above and beyond to make my experience more pleasurable, buy yourself a drink later’ amount of about £3-5.
I don’t appreciate it being expected here, I often find service is worse because they just expect to get 15% of your bill added on as a tip. I often don’t, I apply my British tipping method if the service has impressed me.
Rus’ brother is a server so I’ve already been told how awful my attitude is. Whatever, I’m on a budget.

So Rus and I were deciding if a tip was worthy, the waitress had done an okay job, I mean she hadn’t dropped anything, and she did seem to be working alone, and I had not proof that she had invented the pureéd spinach sandwich.
Firstly she approached the table next to us and asked them to leave – I was four inches from this table, we were practically eating together while politely ignoring each others existence. Their table was reserved for someone at 1:30 and they had been there since 12:30 so if they could just finish off. In the waitress’s defense she did seem to cringe as she said it.
Then I heard her approach the table behind us and offer to top the tea up with hot water.
I went cold. The tea was a little weak already, I had had to squish and squeeze the teabag to get it to release it’s beautiful flavour. And now this lady’s tea was at risk of being further diluted! Did she know or did she think that tea was meant to be a weak flavourless, slightly brown, beverage?!
The room started to spin and I had to leave.

I don’t know if Rus tipped, I just said “I’m done, take me for mexican” and left in a flurry.

Sunday hike – Laguna coast wilderness park

Since my first blog post on the subject I have continued to go on the weekly hikes*, I had planned on writing about them all so anyone else in the area could benefit of the places we’re uncovering – a lot of them are probably very well known, especially with locals, but there might be some SoCal newbies out there like me.

However, as you know, I haven’t mentioned it since week one. The walks we’ve done haven’t been really worth writing about. This week was week 7 – we should be on 8 but we missed a week due to a late night partying and a certain husband being hungover, and until then we’d mainly been walking around flat nature reserves looking at the same half drained lake from different angles.

One week took us to Bolsa Chice Ecological reserve and yes, I’m sure the birds love it there and enjoy having a safe haven. But as a place to walk? Seriously! It’s right next the PCH, all the plants seem to be in the various stages of dying and I’m sure the birds would much rather be left alone to waddle through mud and catch fish.
Another week saw us on the Bayview Trial in Upper Newport Bay and their ecological reserve – side note: That’s another thing I’m not enjoying about hiking here, the place is so over run with cities, car dealer ships, fast food joints and malls that the nature has all been consolidated into one area. In this case that one area included tarmac-ed paths for our ease and comfort. WHO GOES HIKING ON TARMAC?!
The worse so far has to be the San Joaquin wildlife sanctuary. I don’t think the park was necessarily worse than the others, it didn’t lack something the others had had, in fact it had a little stream which was a nice edition. It’s more that by week five we were beyond fed up of sanctuary and reserve rambling.
Although when I have children, or am babysitting a niece/nephew, they are great places to go with a push chair.

This week however was different. This was more like the stuff I’d done back in England in the Dales and Peak district. We were at Laguna Coast Wilderness Park on a walk that promised 600ft elevation!
The place was lovely, I really enjoyed it. The walk begins with the most intense part of the incline which, had I known, I would have suggested we do the walk in reverse because it ends on a flat, along a dried out riverbed in the shade. I feel like having that to warm us up would have made the incline an easier and more enjoyable feat.
My British origin was evident on the climb up, I am not used to walking or even being outside in such sunshine. We’d got up early and headed out about 930am in an attempt to beat the worse of the days heat but the sun clearly knew our plan and caught us out. Half way up I made the californian lizard folk stop so I could stand in the shade for a minute or two. Of course this resulted in ridicule and I’ve challenged them all to come on a 1200ft hike in the cold wet winds. That’s my natural habitat, that’s where I thrive!

At the top of the hill you are meant to be able to see the ocean, but the smog prohibits that. Instead you see a hazey blur and pretend its the ocean. We had a choice now, turn left and add a 3 mile extension or loop behind our selves and head back to the car.
It had already been decided that we would stick to the short route so we pretended to enjoy the smog view for a moment while we re-hydrated and ate oranges before beginning the much gentler decline.

The place was quite busy, lots of cyclists whizzing down the hill. I’m always amazed that they aren’t sticking their legs out and screaming in delight as the shoot down the hillside. But I’m also always amazed that they don’t have handle bar streamers or a sweet floral whicker basket for snacks. I’m clearly not of a cycling mentality.
We also passed a few families and couple all slightly out of breath as they scrambled up the hillside.
And Asian folk. On every hike we’ve seen a different  group of asian youths always looking like they’re being forced by their parents (even though there are none around) and always carrying a speaker playing drum and bass as they dawdle around the reserve impeccably dressed in designer gear with beautifully coiffed hair. They really do look stunning but I cannot understand why anyone would prefer such awful music to the birdsong, or crashing waves, or running river, or even just the silence that the various walks have to offer as a soundtrack.

Next week we are attempting a 10 mile, 1300 ft elevated hike and, even more difficult, we want to be up and out by 8am to beat the sun. Maybe I’ll become a night time hiker and go on moonlit strolls, take a thermos of soup for if it’s chilly and never have to worry about skin cancer, the sticky feel of sun cream or the bugs it seems to attract.

*I use the term loosely, this is not hiking as any yorkshire man would know it. There’s no mud – hell you’re on tarmac a lot of the time, rarely an incline and not surpassing 4 miles.

Baking Challenge – February

Before I left the UK my sister gave me a Great British Bake Off calendar, each month has a different recipe on it and I decided to do each one.

January’s was an Olive Loaf and I despise olives so I skipped that and made rosemary bread instead. I would have blogged about it but starting off on a bum note seemed silly and I was glum in January.

February’s recipe was Raspberry Love Heart Biscuits. For my American readers a biscuit is a cookie in American English, in British Proper English a biscuit is a cookie when it has chocolate chips in it. I’m still yet to try an American biscuit so I don’t know what the comparison is, I’m thinking it might be like a scone.

For the recipe you will need a food processor, that’s the one with the blades because you have to crush the almonds. If you don’t have one put the almonds in a bag, seal, and smash with a rolling pin.

You’ll also need two cookie cookers (I call them that not because I am becoming american but because I enjoy alliterations ask Charlie the Chihuahua or Percy the Pug if you don’t believe me), one needs to fit inside the other to make a hole so you can see a lovely jammy centre. I used hearts because it’s valentines day but any shape would do.

The almonds make the mixture extra oily and it is really tempting to use loads of flour during the rolling out process. I beg and advise you to resist this urge as it will end in very dry biscuits. If you have a marble counter top that will help, if you don’t then a glass cutting board will be your friend – cut the dough into four so you don’t go bigger than the cutting board. You’ll also benefit from the use of a thin metal fish slice or American ‘spatula’.

The Recipe

Ingredients for the biscuit
100g unblanched almonds
200g plain flour
A good pinch of salt
80g Icing sugar (that’s powdered sugar in America)
125g unsalted butter chopped
3 large free range egg yolks (how I miss free range eggs!)

Ingredients for the filling
200g raspberries
2 tsp cornflour (that’s cornmeal in America)
3 tbsp caster sugar

Method
In a food processor put the flour, salt and almonds. Pulse until the almonds are crushed.
Add the icing sugar and pulse to mix.
Add the butter and pulse until the mixture looks like sand – this won’t take too long.
Add the egg yolks and pulse until it forms a dough. Wrap the dough in clingfilm and pop in the fridge for 15 minutes, 30-40 if you live in California and it’s bloody hot. Again.
Preheat the oven to 180 Celsius or 350 Fahrenheit or Gas Mark 4.
Lightly flour a counter top and roll the mixture out until it is the thickness of a pound coin, which is maybe like two nickles stacked atop one another.
The recipe makes 12 x 8cm biscuits so cut out 24 of your larger shape cutters then cut the smaller shape out of 12, giving you 12 bottoms and 12 tops. Place on a baking sheet and bake for about 10-12 minutes until they are a very light golden brown.
Once cooked leave to cool on the tray for 10 minutes before transferring to a cooling wrack.

Now it’s time to make the jam!!

Wash the raspberries and and place in a saucepan with the sugar and cornflour. Stir over a medium heat and watch the raspberries turn to mulch.
Bring to the boil and simmer for 2 minutes.
Allow to cool.1

Once the biscuits and the jam have both cooled spread the jam over a base biscuit the squish on a top biscuit. You’ll notice the jam pushed up through the centre hole so spread more out to the sides before the squishing commences.

Mary Berry recommends serving with cream, extra raspberries and a sprinkle of icing sugar and who am I to argue with her?!

We also had tea with ours, we invited our friends around for a late valentines afternoon tea session. Everyone marveled at how English I am and I sat feeling very superior and smug. That’s a bit of a joke, a little of my British sarcasm leaking through onto the page, please don’t send me hate telling me that if I love England so much I should go home. It’s not that I’m worried I’ll lose in a battle of the wits, I just can’t be arsed with that right now because I have a cat to play with.

Grief

This past month has been hard.

After finding out my friend had died I spent a week unable to shake my melancholy mood, I distracted my self as well as I could with the restrictions that are in place here – no job, no car, no really good friends.

When I moved out here I had a list of things I wanted to do, I planned on reading a book every month, seriously practicing yoga, maybe taking up running, learning italian, and blog about it all (for myself to look back on mainly) and all that has fallen to the wayside during this past month.

Not knowing what happened to Lucy during those final hours, being so far away from anyone else who knew her and having a lot of time to think has made everything feel a little pointless. It also fell in with my PMS and, maybe due to my grief, my period was three weeks late. Three weeks of PMS is not a fun thing for anyone under any conditions.

The funeral was at the beginning of this week. I awoke at 230am and lit a candle for when the ceremony was held in the UK. I then re-lit it at 1030am California time with plans to let it burn out throughout the day. I called friends back home who had attended the funeral to see how it had gone, and to try and find out exactly what had happened. But the family are being quite tight lipped about specifics beyond ‘she took her own life’.

I still like to think it was accidental.

After my phone calls I was ravenous, I thought about leaving the candle lit, about taking it downstairs with me and finally about blowing it out. I felt a little disappointed in myself for not being able to just leave it lit – anxiety is an awful thing. But when I blew it out I felt a weight kind of lift. This week my mood has felt lighter and brighter as the days have passed.So back to the to do list!

Billy Bobcat

About a month ago I did something I never thought I would do.

I excitedly purchased a kitten.

I have always been a dog person, mainly because I am from a dog family. My sister went through a cat phase but living on a busy road it did not end well for the poor guy.
As a child I had a kitten which turned into a cat and meowed loudly and left mice heads in my shoes and was far from a joy.

When I was 14 I got a chihuahua, after two years of nagging my poor parents, and it was love at first sight. There’s just something absolutely wonderful about coming home to a dog and them greeting you with a wag of the tail. They make splendid walking companions – I’ll admit Charlie the Chihuahua fell short in this category but being a dog family we had another five to pick from for walkies. They are the perfect nap buddies and they don’t have sharp claws or a penchant for scratching walls.

Cats on the other hand always seems a little selfish, they would come for feeding and petting but always on their terms and when they were done they would bite you and leave, swishing their tail arrogantly as they left.

When I moved over, Rus promised me a dog. Unfortunately he didn’t think to check with his parents who weren’t exactly over keen on the idea. I also got to thinking about the time commitment. Right now I have nothing but free time, but by the end of the year, if not sooner, I would like to be working again and it would be cruel to leave a dog used to 24/7 attention on his own.

So no california dog for me.

One night Rus suggested I get a kitten. I made a face and said no thank you. In his attempts to persuade me he took me to shelters and showed me ads on craigslist but I still struggled to get excited about it.

Then I saw an advert for Billy. He was born on the streets and then found by the pound. He was next in line for the Lethal Injection when he was recused. Unfortunately his mum wasn’t so lucky and the rescuer had to hand rear him. The ad was asking for someone with the time to pour into helping a skitty, nervous cat.
He was described as a suspected Main Coon mouthbreather who’s tongue shoots out when he sneezes. His picture was adorable.

I made the call and found out all about him. I wasn’t a cat person admittedly but something about this guy made me want to try. There are so many animals in this country who are put to death because we decide they’re overpopulating the streets, why shouldn’t I save one? I could grow to be a cat person perhaps, I could play with yarn.

Just so long as I didn’t have to deal with mice heads in my shoes.

We collected Billy a month ago and I fell in love with him instantly. He spent his first week hiding under the sofa, running out to eat and use the toilet when we weren’t in the room. Slowly he’s got used to me, as I have to him. He sits and watched soaps with me, joins in on skype calls and loves playing fetch. He’s happy to cuddle but more than happy to be left alone with his toys and food.

My family are all very shocked at choosing a cat but right now I’m struggling to think why I wanted a dog in the first place.

 

 

Secret Garden

When I was young, like most girls my age, I watched The Secret Garden. After that any time I was near a large hedge or overgrown bramble I would expect to find a door. One time I did find an old key which I would take with me whenever I thought I was likely to come into contact with a hedge. I never found a door, I never found a secret garden and  I never turned out to be a princess… although that might have been another film.

We did get an allotment though and every weekend my family and I would trudge down to it and check on the fruits and vegetables, pull out weeds, plant potatoes etc. then go home to make rhubard crumbles and eat peas straight from the pod.
For those who don’t know, an allotment is an area of land, owned by the local council, which you rent to grow fruits and veggies.
I think they were originally set up in WW2 when everyone was growing extra food to make up the rations. Nowadays they are mainly populated by older men, escaping their wives for an afternoon with their allotment buddies.

We gave our allotment up when I was about 12, I’m not sure why. Perhaps my parents became disinterested or the rent went up. By then I’d moved on from wanting to find a secret garden but the enjoyment I got from planting a seed and watching it turn into a plant is deep-rooted (lolz punz).

Rus has a balcony off of his bedroom, unused except by the cat, I expressed an interest in getting some plants on it last time I visited, I envisaged growing a few herbs that would make the evening air fragrant as we sat sipping drinks and reading books. Rus went into overdrive and bought about twenty million plants. He then promptly got bored of it and they all started dying off. The mini succulents in their tiny pots remained knocked over by a swish of the cat’s tail, the peppers shriveled up, the herbs dried out and turned to fragrant dust.

I decided to take matters into my own hands and spent the last few weeks slowly working through all the plants, I’ve used my gardening knowledge (all learned from the secret garden film) to check which were saveable and which needed to go. I managed to get rid of a lot of them before Rus figured out what I was doing – he’s somewhat of a hoarder.
When he found out he was a little upset, I’m not too sure why because it wasn’t like he was tending to the plants. To reassure him I wasn’t just recklessly throwing things away I told him my Secret Garden tip; that if something looks dead and you nick it with a knife and it’s green inside then it’s actually saveable with a bit of TLC.
Rus got really excited by this and started chopping at everything and exclaiming ITS ALIVE! like a mad man. Unfortunately they were the ones I’d already checked (and two new ones that I’d only just bought. Which were still green. AND FLOWERING) and his ‘nicking’ was actually chopping off an entire stem so I have a few half-hacked up, but very much alive, plants.
Then he got to the coriander plant which looked very much dead, I’d already tugged at it and it was so dry it just crumbled away, right from the root, all that remained was a little twig that I’d already decided to get rid of. But, Rus had his shears and chopped it in half and sure enough there was a bit of green inside. Rus got really excited that he hadn’t killed all the plants and is insisting I keep it and look after it. So every other day I water a twig in a pot and wonder how I didn’t realise Rus had special needs sooner and if he’ll notice if I just replace it.

Before and after shots…

Suicide

My friend died, she killed herself, and it’s been horrible. It’s made worse by being 6000 miles away from it all and by being told the details on Facebook.

We worked together and she was troubled, she never opened to me directly because I’m twenty years younger and what did I know.

But I wish she had, because I’d have genuinely listened and not used it as a platform to talk about myself, I wouldn’t have encouraged the self medicated wine, I wouldn’t have asked how she was just to hear the latest gossip. I would have tried to help because she was a nice person and deserved a friend. Yet despite meeting her for coffees and going out for meals she never opened up to me.

I wish I’d poked my nose in more, and not been worried about seeming to be interfering. I wish I’d spoken up when I heard worrying snippets of conversations she was having with other members of staff. I wish I’d asked her why she was hungover yet again, and just how much had she drank. I wish I’d shouted at her for repeatedly drink driving. I wish I’d told the ones she had spoken to to try harder to help her.

If anyone you come into contact with is visibly struggling with life, if your coworker is repeatedly coming in stinking of booze, if someone is crying on the bus, if someone has cuts on their wrists, if someone is withdrawing from life, reach out to them. Because I didn’t and now my friend is dead. A mother is dead. A daughter is dead.

And if you’re struggling, if life is really hard for you right now, reach out to someone. Even if they’re younger, even if they don’t have the same issues, even if they’re always laughing. It doesn’t mean they won’t bend over backwards to help you. Because there is nothing romantic about suicide, everything just ends. And even if right now that seems like a good idea, you could not be more wrong.

50 hikes and a turtle hunt.

On a recent trip to Barnes and Nobel I found this little gem of a book. It was just after the weekend before NYE and Rus and I had done NOTHING all weekend, I was going stir crazy, we were both crabby and fed up and realising that we needed stuff to fill our time with.

I have always loved walking and hiking, as a child I would spend my weekends with my family and our dogs on the hills of Derbyshire, playing in rivers or waterfalls, scaring sheep and eating a picnic elevated high above sealevel.
As an adult I still enjoyed trips to the peaks but work prohibited it being a too frequent event. Luckily I was still just a ten minute walk from farmers’ lanes, woodlands, small hills and glorious scenery.
And even if I didn’t have time for that a trip to the local supermarket was a stroll under beautiful trees, past quaint brick houses (and maybe a petrol station or two), over a canal, along a river. Everywhere was nature.

Here in California it’s a different story. I’m living in a city, a concrete jungle, everything is spread out and nothing is a walk away. If I am going on a walk one evening, it’s around neighbourhood streets, past homeless men and along rows of telephone poles. There is nothing quaint, historic or beautiful about this place. Unless you happen to be out at sunset, that can be quite marvellous.

So I’ve been quite keen to try out hiking here, clearly a street walk won’t fill any void but maybe the secret lies within the hiking trails. This book is split into three sections, Coastal, Foothills and Mountain hikes each range from easy to moderate and they cover a wide variety of content, some are nature based in national parts, others lead you to historical places or encourage you to look for fossils, or, like the one we started with, send you on an animal hunt.

The first walk of the book is super easy, it’s in Seal Beach and along a bike trail next to the river. Looking ahead the scenery isn’t obviously beautiful, it’s a power plant.

But!

Because of the power plant draining it’s hot water into the river the temperature has risen and allowed for turtles to inhabit the place. There’s also wrens, hawks, ducks, fish and the possibility of seals in the river too so the entire time you are encouraged to keep and eye on the water and every ripple gets you excited.
Now I’ll be honest, it was no hike in the highlands of Scotland. It was a heavily used hike, in fact I won’t even call it a hike, it was a walk. Along tarmac. With quite a lot of rubbish on the banks. And a couple of homeless people in the way.

One thing I always loved about walking in the UK was that feeling of who may have walked before you, what their story was, were they running from an argument, meeting a lover for a secret rendezvous. And when was it first walked along. There was no replacement for that feeling of walking in another’s footsteps on this walk. Though I suppose this one was about turtles, not history, and in America you can’t have both because Native American’s didn’t walk on tarmac.

Ooops

I haven’t posted in a long time.

I got stressed and anxious and sitting at a computer was the last thing I wanted to be doing. The move kind of sprung itself on me, I had been working towards it for two years and then all of a sudden I was buying tickets and packing my bag and it was more than I could handle – packing up my life as my family are all getting set for a christmas together.

Rus had a few personal things going on in his own world, things that aren’t mine to mention here, but it meant he wasn’t around to chat that much and that certainly made it a lot harder.

I was going to just let the blog go, stop writing and switch to tumblr full time but that isn’t the place for long rambling posts and writing does make me feel… something. I don’t know how to describe it, it isn’t like I’m miserable and this is a place to let go, to release all my torment or anything like that because my life is pretty good right now. I guess I just enjoy it.

So I packed up stuff, kissed my parents farewell and hopped on a plane to LA. A week later I was married and that was a weird feeling. I store Rus in my phone as Husband! just to remind myself that yes that really happened (in a good way).

America is bizarre, it’s very similar to the UK – mainly because of the language, but then it’s very different – mainly because of the Americans. I’m settling in and it’s becoming more normal but I’m still pining for home in some ways. We cooked a big roast dinner on Christmas Eve, it was dark out, we had christmas pop music playing and it was hot in the kitchen so I opened the door sincerely expecting to be hit by that wall of cold air, so cold it catches in the back of your throat and makes your chest feel damp.

Instead it was warmer outside than in the kitchen.

When things like that happen and catch me unawares I want to go and sit on my bed and close the curtains and take a nap. But I don’t, I power through and hope no one notices the lump in my throat.

So I’m hoping writing will help me straighten out any sad feelings in my head, help me document any fun things we do and also give me a bit of a hobby. I can’t work for quite a while and, living with his parents, I have very few household chores to do.