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Jennie Day Blog

Victoria B.C. Anniversary Trip

February 12, 2018 By jennie

In August 2016, to celebrate our three year wedding anniversary, Joel and I took a long weekend trip to Victoria B.C. Five years earlier, we’d gone on a similar trip to celebrate our one year dating anniversary. (Fun fact: our wedding anniversary is just a couple of days after our dating anniversary, so it’s like we get to celebrate both at the same time.) Victoria is so beautiful, and so easy to get to from Seattle, and we’d been meaning to go back – it just took us 5 years to get around to it.

When we went in 2011, we were on a really tight budget; we stayed in a hotel about a 20 minute walk from downtown because it was inexpensive, and we basically just wandered around and looked at the shops. Don’t get me wrong, we had a great time … but our 2016 trip was so much more fun because we stayed at the Chateau Victoria, which is in the middle of the city and houses one of our favorite Victoria restaurants (Vista 18), and made a point of visiting the popular tourist spots.

We spent Saturday afternoon touring the Royal B.C. Museum, starting with an IMAX movie Mammoths: Titans of the Ice Age. We learned about Lyuba, a mammoth calf who was discovered in Syberia … and then got to see her on display at the museum!

Don’t worry, some of the displays said “please touch.”

I had visited the Royal B.C. Museum in my younger years, but didn’t remember it … until we walked into “Old Town,” the modern history exhibit. Major deja vu!

Because of the timing of our IMAX movie, we’d missed lunch and were famished and disappointed to find that many of the restaurants in town were closed — despite it being Saturday night. We did not know this when we booked our vacation, but that weekend happened to be iconic Canadian band The Tragically Hip’s final concert, and apparently all across Canada, cities shut down to allow people to watch the concert. We happened to find a really excellent Thai restaurant that was open (with the show playing on the TV in the bar, natch) and had what turned out to be one of the best meals of our weekend.

The pad Thai looks like any other plate of pad Thai, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that it was super-delicious.

The highlight was our drinks – frozen sangria! I was probably a bit dehydrated, and could have easily downed, like, three of these. They were sweet and tasty and refreshing.

After it got dark, we headed back to the waterfront to meet our tour group for a walking ghost tour of downtown Victoria! Victoria is allegedly one of the most haunted cities in Canada. I’d found this randomly online and it was pretty inexpensive, so we decided to give it a whirl … and it was a blast. Most of the stories featured ghost exacting their revenge on the living, but there are some friendly ghosts in the city, too.

The next day, we set off early for Butchart Gardens, so we’d have plenty of time to explore the gardens before our lunchtime tea reservation.

Butchart Gardens was another spot I’d visited many moons ago, but didn’t remember until we walked in.

Then we stopped for tea time in the fine dining hall. They are easily able to accommodate gluten free diners, so long as you make a reservation 24 hours in advance.

Bottom tier: sandwiches and savory items, including a gluten free sausage roll! (Confession: Secret Eaters, a British show that followers dieters in their weight loss efforts, is one of my guilty pleasures. They show sausage rolls frequently, but I assumed I’d never find a gluten free version to try. I was happy to be proven wrong.)

Middle tier: pastries and a truffle.

Top tier: a scone with clotted cream and jam.

(Interestingly, when we had tea at of Morgana’s bachelorette party, the middle and top tiers were reversed.)

In the late afternoon, we headed over to the dock for our return trip home on the Victoria Clipper. We checked in and took our seats in the terminal, just in time to hear the announcement: “due to windy conditions, the Clipper will not be able to make the crossing to Seattle.” Joel and I looked at each other like, “wait, WHAAAA …?”

Not to worry, the Clipper has dealt with this before, and had a backup plan. We shuffled out into the parking lot and loaded up into charter buses … where they drove us around the block and back to the ferry dock immediately next door.

We loaded up and took the ferry back to Port Angeles, arriving right about when we thought we’d be back in Seattle. From there, we drove down to Bremerton and took a ferry back across to Seattle. Lucky for us, Joel and I just had small carry-ons, so we didn’t need to load back onto the charter bus and head over to the Clipper dock. Instead, we walked off the ferry and called an Uber, finally arriving back home at about 12:45am.

But as we’ve learned from our previous adventures, it’s the times when things go wrong that make the best stories.

Filed Under: Travel

Jennie & Joel’s Epic Summer Road Trip 2017

December 22, 2017 By jennie

Because our wedding anniversary is just two weeks before my birthday, which is just two weeks before Joel’s birthday, we like to plan a vacation or big project (see: our 2015 bathroom remodel!) as an anniversary/birthday present to one another. Over a year ago, when he learned that the 2017 solar eclipse would be 1. visible from Oregon, and 2. just days before our anniversary, Joel proposed that our 2017 vacation be a road trip.

We agreed to spend a weekend in eastern Washington with his parents, then head south into Oregon for the eclipse, then west to Portland for our anniversary. What a great time we’d have!

Then my best friend, Morgana scheduled her wedding for Labor Day weekend, just a week and a half after the eclipse, in San Francisco. We tossed around the idea of going on our road trip, coming home for a few days, and then flying down to California. But what if, Joel suggested, we combine the two and spend a week driving down highway 101?

It seemed crazy and I was resistant at first, because two and a half weeks seemed like a really, really long road trip. How could I take that long a vacation? Who would take care of our cat? But eventually I gave in – I had just enough vacation time and my sister was able to house sit for us – and it ended up being a total blast.

We spent a total of 18 days/17 nights on the road:

  • 2 nights in Pasco, WA with my in-laws
  • 2 nights in Union, OR (well, one of those we mostly spent at a rest stop just outside of Lime, OR, to see the eclipse!)
  • 2 nights in Portland, OR
  • 1 night in Seaside, OR
  • 1 night in Coos Bay, OR
  • 1 night in Eureka, CA
  • 1 night in Mendocino, CA
  • 3 nights in San Francisco, CA
  • 3 nights in Marin, CA
  • 1 night in Ashland, OR

For a total of roughly 2900 miles.

Some of the highlights:

Day 1: Did we overpack??

Day 3: Welcome to Oregon!

Photos from the eclipse!

It’s hard to take a selfie with eclipse glasses on.

Here’s the view of the rest stop from the top of the hill. We were at the bottom of the hill in the parking lot.

The light through the trees.

And the totality! It was amazing, this doesn’t do it justice. We were just shy of the center of totality and so got to see it for about 2 minutes.

Day 7: Lunch on our anniversary in Tillamook, OR – cheese samples and ice cream 🙂

We made a little detour through Cannon Beach to see Haystack rock.

Seals at Cape Arago State Park in Coos Bay

View of Mendocino

Welcome to San Francisco!

We did the Alcatraz night tour, which was really interesting … and cold!! The night tour is the way to go, because they take the boat all the way around the island and you can see the city. But — the night tour sells out more quickly than the day, so we had to buy our tickets way in advance, even before we had our hotel booked! (This is a recurring theme in our travels.)

The guides and rangers and staff were really funny and engaging – as we were getting off the boat for the tour, one of the guards said, “enjoy your time in prison, we’ll pick you up in the morning!” And the guide started out tour by saying, “since this is probably the first time in prison for most of you …” (though it was Joel’s and my second time 😉 )

We walked across the Golden Gate Bridge (it was terrifying.) The view from Marin county!

My own special gluten free tea tray at Morgana’s bachelorette party. (Believe it or not, this is one of the only food photos I took on this trip! It still makes me laugh that I spent so long snapping photos of almost every meal I ate back in my food blog days.)

The best meal that we ate in San Francisco was at China Live in Chinatown, and you’ll have to just take me at my word because I forgot to take a picture. They had a number of gluten free options on the menu, and we sat at the counter and watched the chefs prepare dumplings (those weren’t GF 🙁 )

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Morgana and Grahme had a beautiful wedding in Marin – and an amazing photographer. You can’t tell in this photo that it was 108 degrees that day and we were sweating buckets!

Then we raced up I-5 so I could be back in the office on Tuesday. There were wildfires raging throughout Oregon, so the drive home was mostly smoky. We stayed overnight in Ashland to see the Oregon Shakespeare festival perform Julius Caesar, and made a pit stop back in Portland for a second round of tacos from Por Que No?

Day 18 – back in Washington, home sweet home ♥

Filed Under: Travel

A Coconut Break

April 21, 2016 By jennie

I almost titled this post “A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,” but I decided that would be too obvious 🙂

One afternoon, several days into our stay at Black Rock Lodge, some people from our yoga group mentioned that they’d not yet taken the complimentary sustainability tour. Mom and I had not yet managed to take the tour, so we decided to tag along.

Before we set out on the tour, our guides Giovanni and Freddy made sure they had a machete and a handful of straws.

Mom and I exchanged glances that said, “uh oh … what have signed ourselves up for now?!”

As I mentioned in my post about the lodge, they are fully off the grid, so on the sustainability tour we got to see the solar hot water system and solar batteries and the waste water treatment. We hoped we’d have time to go down and see the gardens, but we had to get back for our afternoon yoga practice.

Instead, we stopped near the parking lot, where Giovanni announced, “we’ll stop here for a coconut break!”

(This delighted me as much as the sparkling wine break on safari in South Africa.)

coconut_tree picking_coconuts

They used a forked branch to knock a few coconuts out of the trees, and Freddy hacked them open …

machete

So *that’s* what the machete was for …

There were young coconuts, out of which we enjoyed a refreshing drink of coconut water!

coconut_water

… and that explains the straws.

And a mature coconut, from which the water has been absorbed into the rind and the meat is ready to eat. (We ate some … in case that wasn’t clear!)

A few days later, during our yoga practice in the palapa, we watched one of the waiters in the restaurant walk down to the river, pick up a giant forked branch, and carry it over his shoulder back up the hill.

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When we went back to the restaurant for lunch, there was a big stack of coconuts, ready to be the day’s special.

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The coco loco!

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There are several different variations on the coco loco that I found online, but I think this one on allrecipes.com is pretty close to what we had.

Thanks for indulging me in a coconut break. Back to more sightseeing recaps next week!

Filed Under: Travel

Belize Botanic Gardens

April 11, 2016 By jennie

belize_botanic_gardens

Last fall, every time I heard someone say “Belize,” my ears would perk up. Now, most of the time, when people around me were talking about Belize, it was because they (or someone they knew) had been and wanted to recommend a particular site or activity. But once, it came up because a modality of massage called Mayan Abdominal Therapy originated in Belize. There happened to be a workshop in Seattle in November, and I signed myself up because obviously it was meant to be.

The workshop wasn’t exactly what I expected, but it did set up a very clear expectation for my trip to Belize: the Maya people had a strong connection to plant life as plants were used for food, buildings, clothing, medicine, and spiritual rituals, and that connection remains in Belize today. Dr. Rosita Arvigo, who studied with the Maya shaman Don Elijio Panti in Belize, brought the massage techniques and interest in medicinal plants to the U.S.

So when Mom and I arrived at Black Rock Lodge, and they mentioned that the Belize Botanic Gardens were just a canoe float away, I convinced Mom that we had to visit.

Before we got into the canoe, our guide Isaias warned us to keep our expectations in check – the gardens are not full of lush, beautiful flowers; but mostly medicinal plants.

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We walked through the grounds, ending up in the orchid house, which was full of lush, beautiful flowers. So let’s start there.

black_orchid

This is Belize’s national flower – the black orchid. It’s an air flower, and usually grows on trees.

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vanilla_orchid

This is a vanilla orchid – it wasn’t currently flowering, but the flower produces the pod that has the vanilla flavoring we all know and love. This is the only orchid that produces edible fruit!

medicine_trail

All right, let’s start back at the beginning. The grounds of the Belize Botanic Gardens are spread out to make several distinct parts of the park, grouping certain plants together. There were also a few small attractions, like the pond, where a family of turtles were sunning themselves on a log …

turtles

I only had my phone and not my big camera, so my pictures aren’t especially clear, but there’s one full grown turtle that you can easily see, and there were three tiny turtles crawling around 🙂

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Another attraction was the Maya House, which was built completely out of materials from the botanic gardens, including a bed and kitchen inside.

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The roof of the Maya House (as well as all the palapas we visited during the course of our stay) was thatched with leaves from the bay leaf palm tree. The leaves are bundled together and tightly woven to deter bugs from nesting in it and resist water. Several of our guides explained that the leaves have to be cut between the full moon and the new moon; if they are cut after the new moon, the molecules will be spaced further apart and the leaves won’t be as stable. Apparently, part of the roof over Black Rock Lodge’s restaurant had not been harvested at the right time in the moon’s cycle, and was prone to rot where the rest of the roof was fine.

I took a ton of pictures, but I’ll spare you from sitting through innumerable photos of leafy green trees. Here were a couple of my favorites:

tamarind_pods

These are tamarind pods! I’m not sure why (maybe something to do with my quest to make the perfect pad Thai sauce, or maybe it’s the tamarind flavored margaritas I like at Matador) but I’m obsessed with tamarind. I’ve found tamarind pods and tamarind paste at our local Asian market, but I’d never seen them growing before. Isaias peeled a couple of pods for us to taste – they were extremely sour.

cinnamon

And this is a tiny cinnamon tree! Ground cinnamon of course comes from the bark, but we crushed the leaves up between our fingers and they were very fragrant.

toucans

As we walked through the grounds, Isaias kept plucking different fruits out of the trees for us to taste. I was really hungry, but I can’t say any of the things we tried were particularly good! After the tour, we headed back to the restaurant for lunch, where these toucans were having some pineapple.

But first, we walked through the rainforest portion of the grounds.

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rainforest

Over 70% of Belize is tropical rainforest which is protected by the government, however, rainforests are in trouble and since they provide nearly half of the earth’s oxygen, we kind of need them to stick around. Some things we should all be doing to help the rainforests:

  • Shop less. Favor used over new, and local over imported when buying.
  • Drive less, and consider alternate modes of transportation and carpooling to use less fossil fuel.
  • Make sure the flowers and foliage you buy in your flower arrangements come from a sustainable source. In particular, xate (fishtail palm) has been so popular as a decorative palm that it’s been over-harvested.

yesterday_today_tomorrow

I’ll leave you with one last flowering plant we saw at the botanic gardens – this one is called yesterday, today, and tomorrow, because the flowers change color as they bloom.

Back with more Belize adventures later this week!

Filed Under: Travel

Tikal Mayan Archeological Site

April 8, 2016 By jennie

Before our trip to Belize, my mom and I had a few discussions and emails about what kind of sightseeing to do on our vacation. What we eventually decided on was just to figure it out once we arrived 😉

But I knew for sure that I wanted to see some ruins.

Now, we knew that Black Rock Lodge was close enough to the Guatemalan border that crossing it to see Tikal was a reasonable distance – but we agreed that it wasn’t our top priority as going across another border sounded unnecessarily complicated.

Well, when we expressed to Petro, the manager at Black Rock, that we’d like to see ruins, she recommended Tikal without missing a beat because 1. the two-and-a-half-hour drive (each way!) is on paved road, and 2. there was already a group planning to go the following day.

Going across the border was not nearly as complicated as we’d imagined because Fernando, our guide from the lodge, basically held our hands and walked us across, and both Belize and Guatemala are happy to let tourists cross their borders as they charge a small fee to do so.

So, it’s taken me two weeks longer than I thought to get this post together, mostly because I haven’t known where to even begin to tell you about Tikal. There are so many details I want to share (and remember) but now I’ve put it off for so long that I’ve already started to forget.

I’ll start by telling you about the park itself. It’s enormous – 575 square kilometers (roughly 142,086 acres.) I had my phone in my camera bag, and it logged 13,786 steps that day (and surprisingly, only 13 flights climbed – I felt like we were climbing stairs and walking uphill constantly! I average more flights climbed going for a walk to the park in my neighborhood.) It’s home to jaguars, but we didn’t see any because they are of course nocturnal.

Being in the middle of a jungle, there are months of flooding, followed by months of drought. The Maya who cultivated the site which is now known as Tikal learned to deal with this by building reservoirs and collecting rainwater.

peligro

Here’s a manmade reservoir, now home to crocodiles.

Only a small fraction of the Mayan structures have been excavated, and we walked a big loop through the park to see them.

Starting with …

temple_climbers

This is one of the smaller ones – if I remember correctly, it’s Temple IV. It was the only one that we were allowed to climb the stairs of the temple (you can see a few people on the top!) Of course, we didn’t know that at the time, so mom and I declined to climb this one in favor of conserving our energy for the bigger temples. Oh, well. (And we did get to climb some of the original temple stairs at a different site, Xunantunich, which I’ll post about next week … or maybe in a few months at the rate I’m going!)

We continued on the loop to the next temple: one that brought a lot of attention to Tikal and Guatemala, because it was used as a filming site for Star Wars: A New Hope. That temple has been partially excavated, and a staircase built around it, so that us tourists can climb up and enjoy the view and only minimally disturb the original structure.

stairs

Our guide left us at the bottom of the stairs, and Mom asked him to hold her camera bag while she was climbing. As we set off, he told us, “go take some good pictures, like George Lucas!”

tikal_star_wars

Look familiar?

Yavin_4_Recon

photo source

star_wars_tikal

As you can see, one of those temples is currently undergoing restoration – that’s Temple III, which we went to next. Further in the distance are Temples I and II, which were our last stop of the day.

temple_3

Here’s the view of Temple III from the ground. Again, it’s currently being excavated and restored. (Actually, unless I’m misremembering, the excavation and restoration may have been put on hold. This is mostly due to lack of funds, but our guide explained that there’s also some consternation about whether the buildings should be restored or left in their original state, and if they should be restored, then how much?)

vegetation

Here’s another, smaller building that was only partially excavated. This one really shows how the vegetation overtook the structures.

Then we set off to the main plaza, and Temples I and II.

lost_world

(We passed this sign along the way. Good thing the path to the lost world is clearly marked.)

jaguar_panorama

Here’s the main plaza, and Temples I (left) and II (right.) Both were commissioned by the ruler known as The Great Jaguar. He was entombed in Temple I, and his wife in Temple II. According to our guide, he was the only Mayan ruler who had a temple built for his queen.

jaguar_temple

The temple has nine levels, one for each of the layers of the Mayan Underworld.

temple_one  first_temple
stairs_temple

All of the temples had these tiny, narrow sets of stairs up the side. Our guide explained that they were used by the warriors who protected the temples so they could hastily get to the top. These are on Temple II – obviously, we were not allowed to climb them.

wife_of_jaguar

But it did have a set of stairs built around the back of the temple, so we could climb up and photograph the plaza …

photo_on_temple

… or each other.

close_up_temple

(I was hoping I could zoom in enough to see the inside of Temple I – no such luck.)

Well, I’d better get back into the groove of regular blogging so I can write the rest of my Belize recaps before I forget everything we did and saw! Next week – the Belize Botanic Garden.

Filed Under: Travel

Black Rock Lodge

March 17, 2016 By jennie

Situated in the rainforest of Belize, just between San Ignacio and the Guatemalan border, is Black Rock Lodge. It’s described as an eco-lodge, as it’s fully off the grid, running on solar and hydro power from a nearby spring.

It’s where my mom and I spent the first ten days of our Belize vacation. While we managed to get off the grounds for excursions several days, we spent a lot of our time at the lodge in the open air palapa, doing yoga.

palapa

Or lounging in hammocks on the deck of our cabin, reading.

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So instead of writing day-by-day recaps, as I’ve done for my previous travels, I’ll write recaps of each of our excursions, and the subjects that deserve their own post (i.e., things of which I actually took pictures.) But I must tell you about the lodge, because it was indubitably what I’ll remember most.

Black Rock Lodge is a hotspot in Belize (and maybe the world? it probably depends on who you ask) for bird watching. We saw plenty of other wildlife (monkeys! lizards! iguanas! turtles! an otter!) but mostly lots of birds.

birds2

They set fruit pieces outside of the restaurant for the birds every day – and if you google Black Rock Lodge, this is what you’ll find the most pictures of. We saw this at a couple of other places we visited, and later on, it occurred to me that it’s partly to reduce waste, but largely to keep the birds out of guests’ food at the restaurants.

birds1

toucan

All of the cabins and the restaurant are set along the Macal river. Here’s the view from our cabin:

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Scattered along the part of the river where the lodge sits are big slabs of slate, which are the black rocks for which the lodge is named. (Further upstream is granite; downstream is limestone.)

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Many of the activities were centered around the river: tubing and swimming and canoeing. We passed on swimming and tubing, but did canoe one day … and by canoe, I mean, we luxuriated in a canoe while our guide did all the paddling 😉

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It was in the canoe that we saw the most birds, but I didn’t have my phone or camera with me, so they wouldn’t get wet. Oh, well.

Oh, and I swam in the mineral pool one day … for all of about five minutes. It was unheated, so it felt terrific to get in after a very sweaty hike, and equally terrific to get out and warm up again in the sun.

mineral_pool

Speaking of hikes, we went on a couple of those around the grounds. The first was a leisurely stroll out to Vaca Falls (really more rapids than falls, but pretty nonetheless) …

vaca_falls

brl_hike

… the second was a grueling climb up to the summit of … well, I don’t actually know, but it felt like Mt. Everest at the time. We’d been warned that it was a more challenging hike, but I don’t think we knew quite what we’d signed ourselves up for! A couple of guides went with us, and packed our lunches along for the group so we could eat at the top. It was the best lunch I had all week, mostly because it was the hungriest I’d been all week!

unnamed-2

And on the subject of food … well, I forgot to take any pictures, except for a couple of desserts. Most nights, the dessert was a cake or something that I couldn’t eat, and I had a fruit plate. On our very last night, though, it was flan! I was so excited to have something other than fruit, I had to take a picture.

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I also took a picture of mom’s cobbler one night, because look how cute it was!

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The lodge’s restaurant is big and open air and communal seating. It’s quite charming, lit by natural light during the day and candlelight at night.

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Most of the time, we sat with the other people in our yoga group, but occasionally with other guests from the lodge. My mom pointed out that this is probably the best advertising that the lodge does for the different activities and excursions that they offer, because inevitably when we sat with other people we’d end up talking about where we’d been and what we’d seen, or where we were off to next.

But I’ll tell you more about our excursions starting next week 🙂

Filed Under: Travel

Synchronicity

March 10, 2016 By jennie

In 2012, my mom and I went on our first international yoga retreat to Italy* (though we’d gone to Portland and San Francisco for retreats, and been to several in Seattle.) At the end of our week together, the group sat in a closing circle for a little reflection, and one of the other participants said something like “when I used to travel as a younger person, I looked for the ways that we were different. Now I look for the ways that we are the same.”

At the time, I thought that person was being a bit self-aggrandizing, but obviously it’s stayed with me. Since I’ve been able to travel to more and different places since, I’ve come to appreciate that there’s a sort of synchronicity that happens when you travel.

Every place I go is different, but I notice the similarities. Everywhere I go reminds me of somewhere I’ve already been.

After my trip to South Africa, where we visited Nelson Mandela’s prison cell on Robben Island, I started noticing quotes from Mandela everywhere I went. As I wrote in a post following his death, that experience stayed with me, and that’s why I notice his words now where I didn’t before.

Belize was no different; here’s a Mandela quote painted into a mural on a school in Placencia.

mandela_education

Our trip was lovely: We spent ten days in the rainforest, and then three at the beach. I’m planning several recap posts about the trip … but as I’m writing this, I’ve been home less than 24 hours and I’m a bit sleep deprived, so I’m not even sure what to say.

But I know exactly where I want to start: Tuttifrutti Gelateria in Placencia, which we went to on our final day in Belize.

tuttifrutti

So imagine for a minute that you’re me (don’t be scared, it’s just for a minute.) You’re staying at a resort in the Belizean rainforest, asking for recommendations in the beach town you’re headed to next, and the resort’s manager, who is a South African woman, tells you about an Italian Gelateria.

You get what I’m saying about synchronicity, right?

Actually we would have found our way to the gelato shop regardless – it was also recommended to us by the staff at the hotel where we stayed, the cab driver who took us into town, and the woman who ran the jewelry boutique across the street. Tuttifrutti is the #1 rated restaurant in Placencia on Trip Advisor 😉

tuttifrutti2

The flavor offerings change daily. They all sounded amazing, so we decided to mix two: blackberry, and rum and hazelnut (because when in RomePlacencia.) Both were sweet and rich and creamy, but the rum and hazelnut completely stole the show.

gelato

(My picture is blurry because I was too excited to eat it and couldn’t sit still!)

*I just noticed that many of my travel photos, particularly from Italy, aren’t showing up after the issues I was having with my site last fall. I’ll work on getting those back up.

Filed Under: Travel

Repost: Our Arrival at Bushman’s Kloof

March 7, 2016 By jennie

This post was originally published in February of 2013, shortly after I returned from South Africa. I’m currently off on another adventure, and I decided now would be a great time to go through the archives and share an old favorite post from my travels.

Of course, it’s impossible to pick a favorite – our trip to South Africa was such an amazing experience, I’m not sure the blog posts I wrote then even did it justice. But I knew it had to be the Kloof, and the story about our long drive there always makes me smile.

Anyway, if you want to read more, my post about the Aquila Safari and Robben Island were the other contenders to be reposted. Maybe I should just take a few weeks off from writing new blog posts and share all of my South Africa posts again!

(Just kidding – I’m sure I’ll have as much good stuff to share when I’m back home from Belize!)

***

A week or two before I left of South Africa, one of my coworkers and I were talking about our respective travel experiences, and she said something along the lines of “the times when everything goes right make great memories, but the best stories are when things go wrong.”

I mulled it over, and decided she was probably right, and told her the story about the time my mom and I almost got thrown off a train in Italy (I don’t think I ever actually blogged about it, but it’s definitely the best story from that trip.*) She told me a story about accidentally entering a sailing competition in Mexico. We both laughed. It’s funny when things go wrong!

If you haven’t already guessed where I’m going with this, this is the post about the day in South Africa when things went wrong.

After our week in Cape Town, we were headed up north to Bushman’s Kloof, a resort in north South Africa. Depending on who you ask, it’s either the best hotel in the world or the best hotel in Africa.

Joel’s boss had arranged transport from Cape Town, so early Monday morning, we checked out of our hotel and boarded a luxury bus for what was expected to be a four hour drive. I’ll start this by saying I had no idea the drive would be that long – I figured it would be a couple of hours, tops. But I had a fully charged iPad and some snacks, so we settled in.

About an hour outside of Cape Town, the driver pulled over at a rest stop. Rest stops in South Africa do not have bathrooms or coffee or vending machines. We happened to be at a nice one with a picnic table and some shade.

“I’m so sorry, but the bus has overheated,” the driver told us. “I’ll let it cool down for a few minutes and see what happens, but I don’t know if it can even make it to the next town.”

The bus driver called for a back up — from Cape Town. And we waited at the shaded rest stop in The Middle Of Nowhere, South Africa for the next hour. Finally, we were rescued by a much smaller and less luxurious van. We asked the driver to stop at the next rest stop we came to (the kind with a toilet, I mean.) And we did. After another hour of driving.

And that’s the story. I know, it’s not that exciting (trust me, the one from Italy is better.)

And even if it were a better story, the amazingness that was Bushman’s Kloof negates any trouble we had getting there. We were taken on a tour of our private lodge and the grounds, and kept joking to each other that maybe we’d perished at that rest stop or the van had gone over a cliff on the way down the mountain because “this place must be heaven!”

Our private pool at Koro lodge

Here’s our private pool at the lodge.

Resort life: enjoying sparkling wine with our feet in the pool

Since we arrived much later than we expected to, tea was all laid out for us. The house manager, Malcolm, on the left here, asked if anyone would care for something to drink – tea or coffee or maybe sparkling wine? Yes, sparkling wine, please. We ate with our feet in the pool.

Ostriches and springbok

We had time for a quick game drive (and more drinks) before dinner, and we spotted this group of springbok and a couple ostriches. The ostriches kept pretty well hidden at the kloof, so we were glad to have seen them. Also — they are HUGE. I’d guess about 8 feet tall, from feet to head.

Sunset over the Kloof

We saw some spectacular sunsets at the kloof, and the first was the best. There was a huge wildfire just a few days before (it had actually gotten to the edge of the resort and all the guests had to be evacuated.) Thankfully, it burned out/was put out in the night, but the lingering smoke made for this beautiful sunset.

*Edit to add: I finally blogged about nearly being thrown off the train in Italy. Click here to read the post.

Filed Under: Travel

Gluten Free In “The Other Washington”

November 8, 2013 By jennie

My only regret about our time in D.C. (and it’s pretty minor) is that we spent so little time in the city and didn’t actually eat at any local restaurants. We didn’t realize it right away, but every single place where we ate was a chain! Now, in our defense, they were all East Coast chains, and not anything we can find in Seattle, but it would have been nice to have tried a D.C. exclusive. But like I said, that’s pretty minor. The restaurants we picked, while all chains, were all terrific. My favorites were …

ZPizza

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Like the pizza places I frequent back home … no, that’s a lie. I don’t go out for pizza that often. So when I do, it’s a special treat. This place had regular and gluten-free pizza, but made and cooked the GF pizzas separately, so they are safe. We split an Italian pizza, which had ham, artichoke hearts, pesto, mozzarella, olives, and tomatoes (on my half only 🙂 )

Oh, and when I said that none of the places where we ate are places we have in Seattle, I was wrong. Turns out there’s a zPizza on the Capitol Hill we have in Seattle.

Chop’t Salad

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I’d been dying to try this place since I read Gluten Free Blondie’s post about it. Chopped salads are apparently all the rage on the East Coast (this particular restaurant has several locations in NYC & D.C.)

I was not expecting it to be a fast food restaurant, which is pretty much what it was, and I wasn’t quite sure how it worked, so I ended up ordering one of the salads with their suggested toppings rather than inventing my own. It had beets, feta, and walnuts. I’m generally pretty picky about the lettuce-to-good stuff ratio on my salads, and this was a little too heavy on the lettuce for my taste … but since it was chopped (I mean, chop’t) every bite had enough good stuff and dressing to be plenty flavorful.

Matchbox Merrifield

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This was in the Mosaic District in Fairfax, VA (near the hotel where we stayed.) We ate here on the very long day that we saw all the monuments – by the time we made it to the restaurant, we would’ve eaten just about anything. But this was really good. In case you can’t tell (the photo’s pretty dark) that’s an entire bulb of roasted garlic. There was also some kind of garlic seasoning on the steak, and, for good measure, more garlic on the roasted potatoes. Joel had the same thing, though, so we had garlic breath together.

CAVA Mezze Grill

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This was the Mediterranean version of Chipotle, but way better – and I love Chipotle! Yeah, similar set-up – I had a base of brown rice, then there was a choice of meat (I had chicken) then – this is where it gets good – you can choose a flavored hummus or tzatziki sauce to go on the bowl, then another choice of salad dressing on top of that so everything was doused in delicious olive oil.

Filed Under: Restaurant, Travel

Monumentous

November 1, 2013 By jennie

Get it?! Like, monuments, and momentous, because of the monuments but also because it was our honeymoon …

Okay, ANYway, this is the final recap post from our honeymoon and perhaps my most photo-heavy post to date. Sorry if this one takes a while to load, guys, but there’s lots of good stuff here!

Our morning started in the heart of the city at the National Archives.

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No photos are allowed inside the National Archives building anymore, because some of the documents have been damaged by flash photography.

The documents are pretty amazing – the National Archives holds one of four copies of the Magna Carta, as well as original copies of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. I took the time to read the 12th amendment about how the president is elected. Do you think the 1803 congressional representatives imagined when they wrote that amendment that in 200 years we would get our ballots in the mail and use ballpoint pens to cast our votes? Or that some girl from Washington state would be writing about it on the internet? Or … that there’d be a Washington state … and the internet?

Since it was the day after Labor Day, there weren’t any school tours and we pretty much had our run of the interactive part of the museum. I never would have imagined that we’d have so much fun learning about how parchment was made and the records our government keeps track of, but you know what? It was really interesting.

But we didn’t stick around for too long because there was much to see. It was much cooler than the day before, so we took a walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.

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U.S. Navy Memorial

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The Old Post Office, which is now … a mall

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I just thought this was funny

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The Treasury Department

Finally, we came to the White House.

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This is as close as they’d let us get.

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Then we wandered down to the National Mall to see the Washington Monument. Yes, this is what it looked like while we were there. I didn’t know this, but the monument was damaged in the earthquake that hit Virginia in 2011, and has been covered with scaffolding ever since.

The National Mall is chock-full of memorials, so we started at one end and worked our way down …

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World War II Memorial

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Reflecting pool

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The Lincoln Memorial

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Vietnam War Memorial

Now, I’m making this sound like it was a leisurely stroll through the park … and it was. But we’d walked about three miles by this point, and even though I’ve said it wasn’t as hot as the day previous, it was still pretty damn hot. Proof: I doused myself with a layer of sunscreen, and added a second layer around noon, and STILL ended up sunburnt at the end of the day.

Joel found a shady spot outside the Lincoln Memorial to rest a few minutes.

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But we weren’t done walking yet! We took a cab across the river to Rossalyn, Virginia and breaked for lunch. Then it was just up a hill and across a highway to the Marine Corps War Memorial, better known as Iwo Jima.

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I kind of insisted that we visit this monument, and I’m glad I did – it was one of my favorites. Here’s a fun fact: the sculptor, Felix de Weldon, was an Austrian who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

From the Marine Corps Memorial, we could see a giant structure just up the hill in the distance, so we set off that direction and stumbled on the Netherlands Carillon, a giant bell tower that was gifted to the U.S. from the Netherlands following WWII.

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Looking the other direction is a beautiful view across the river of the U.S. Capitol.

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And from there, it was just another short walk (downhill this time, thankfully) to the edge of Arlington Cemetery, so off we went.

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But we misunderestimated just how big the cemetery is. It’s about a half mile trek across the cemetery to the visitor’s center … where we bought tickets for the bus tour so that we could see the major stops without walking 🙂

The bus tour stops at a few of the most well known sites – first, the Kennedys’ graves.

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Bobby Kennedy’s cross. I’ve got to be honest – I felt a little disrespectful taking pictures of a grave to post on the internet. But it was an incredibly beautiful spot.

The second stop on the bus tour is the amphitheater.

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Just around on the other side of the amphitheater is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was about 15 minutes before the changing of the guard, and we weren’t planning on staying, but we were both (surprisingly) mesmerized by the guard, so we stuck around.

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If you have a few spare minutes, I highly recommend perusing the Wikipedia article on the Tomb of the Unknowns, because it is fascinating. Since we stuck around to watch the guard change, we had to wait for the next bus so we had time to kill, which we pretty much just spent reading Wikipedia. The article on the 3rd Infantry Regiment is also pretty interesting.

If you aren’t interested in reading the full article, here are a few quick facts:

  1. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Guard Identification Badge is the second least awarded badge in the U.S. military.
  2. The guards wear sunglasses year-round because of the glare off the white marble.
  3. On-duty guards do not wear insignia of their rank, so as not to outrank the Unknowns.

The last stop on the tour was at the Arlington House, Robert E. Lee Memorial. Robert E. Lee lived in the house before the surrounding land became a cemetery (which happened during the Civil War.)

… And that’s where I’ll end the recap of our trip. We were in Virginia for about 24 hours after we left Arlington National Cemetery, but we didn’t really do anything of consequence, and it feels irrelevant to write about the shopping and ice cream eating we did later in the day. After we returned home, I was talking about visiting the cemetery with one of my coworkers, and he said “it was overwhelming, like, I haven’t done anything important in my life.”

Yeah, pretty much.

***

I’ll post one last honeymoon post about the food in D.C./VA next week. If you missed any of my previous recap posts, you can find links on this page.

Filed Under: Travel

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