Yours, Truly: henries do highway 1

scott and i got back from our graduation (i graduated! yay!) vacation on monday and holy cow you guys, i needed that. i can't even remember the last time that i went on a vacation without having some sort of side project that i was also working on (program/scholarship applications, homework (summer school was the WORST idea) or wedding planning). even on our honeymoon i was thinking about homework because we had already been in school for a week. being in school has basically had me on gogogo mode all the time, which mostly i love, i'm a do-er, but being able to leave the world behind for a few days was chicken soup for the soul, man. most of the time we were camping, and in and out of cell service/wifi zones. there was no email checking to be had, no back of the mind to-do list nagging at me that would make me resent my vacation when i came back to real life, it was a fantasy!

initially i had planned to plan the whole trip day by day on what we would do (i'm the type of person who makes plans to make plans? i may need an intervention) but i married scott, who hates being stuck to an agenda, so we compromised and i booked campsites/hotels ahead of time, did some research on places i'd like to go, and we hopped in the car and followed our gps. free souls, if you will, blowing wherever the wind carried us. if you're reading this scott, you were right, and this is one of the few times i will agree and say that less plans was better.

driving down highway 1 makes you feel like you're in a car commercial. the roads are narrow and go around all these crazy hairpin turns and the views are seriously unreal. i couldn't stop saying how gorgeous it was. "it's so beautiful." "it is soooo beautiful." "oh my gosh scott i can't believe how beautiful this is!" scott was like "i knooooow, lay off it girl" (only joking of course ;) but really though, it's beautiful.

next best thing on the trip definitely had to be the food. we made it a goal to only eat out once a day, which we stuck to pretty well up until the end of the trip (trying to keep food fresh with ice in a cooler only works for so long. ugh.) but the places we ate served meals i still fantasize about. i think it is really important on vacations to SEE and DO, but scott and i are total foodies (me? nooooo) so TASTE is right up there as well. spending good money on a good meal is just as fun for us as going on a hike or catching sand crabs on the beach (which we also did). we had incredible seafood in san francisco that was sent out to us on a sizzling platter, and our meal in monterey was just. ugh. it was so good! when i feel strongly about something i just repeat the same thing over and over again (see above). and that meal, so good you guys. so good... fresh seafood really is phenomenally better than the alternative. remind me why i live in a landlocked state? we also went to an italian restaurant in tahoe that had lasagna i could write poetry about (that ricotta, droooool).

anyway, it was a great trip. our first real vacation as a married couple, put that one in the record books. on the drive home we talked about where our next big vacation should be. we're hoping to make it down to brazil sometime in the near future (post-internship, during our winter, their summer), and i mentioned hawaii because everybody goes to hawaii and i've never been so we obviously have to fix that, but who knows!

here are some photos from my fancy new camera that i'm still totally learning the ropes to. loving it!

at our first stop in eureka, naturally scott found something to catch

this was literally a 10 minute walk from our campsite. we sat and watched the sunset over the water that night

the trees are like a dr. seuss book all along the coast. they grow sideways because of the ocean breeze

listening to the all the sea lions bark at the pier was a riot, some of those guys are huuuge! we liked watching them climb all over each other

so it costs 6 bucks to drive across the golden gate, which we only had to do once, except we ended up doing 3 times because gps didn't take into consideration road work. there is definitely a learning curve learning how to drive through san fran

one of the beaches along the 17-mile drive in monterey. the sand on this beach was amazingly soft! i was bummed that we didn't get a great view along the drive though with the weather being so foggy and misty

we stopped here and walked down to a beach where scott attempted to catch some fish, no luck. but we DID see a couple getting married there! the bride seriously looked SO beautiful, and how romantic is that to get married in big sur overlooking the ocean?! it was seriously dreamy you guys.