Live. Travel. Play.

Well, it turns out that Janice really is the writer in this family. I’ve been sitting here for ½ hour trying to come up with the the words to describe the perfection of our day.

We started out in Sacramento. Now Sacramento was not in our plans, we were going to head to the coast and enjoy the drive and scenery in leisure, but our VoIP woes with Verizon would not allow it. I had to fix our connectivity issue and Sacramento was the only city near our route that had a Go-Wireless franchise, the franchise that we bought the MiFi4510L from. Long story short…I walked away from the store with a Verizon FiveSpot wifi device that worked perfectly, no charge. We are now happy…right Janice…we’re happy? 🙂

Now we are in Monterey, how we got here is a boring story of interstates and GPS voices saying ‘make a u-turn as soon as possible’.

Monterey is a sweet city. We were able to touch the Pacific ocean for the first time on our trip, hard to believe that in a few months we’ll be touching the Atlantic as well. Besides being a very nice city, we hit the Jackpot and had our first ’50 mile’ meal of the trip. Turns out that every Tuesday Monterey has a street market where local vendors come and sell fruits and vegetables that they picked from their fields.

We made away like thieves. Fresh strawberries. Fresh peaches. Fresh baby greens. Fresh baked Banana bread. Rotisserie chicken. All sourced locally or made locally. (I’ll admit, the bananas from the bread were probably not local). We bought from the growers, not resellers. We bought the chicken from a sprinter van that had been converted into a huge rotisserie. The guy had at least a hundred, if not more, chickens in his sprinter truck, all rotating and cooking as we purchased our ½ chicken. The juices from the chicken dripping onto baking potatoes which were coated with Rosemary. Had we gone to heaven by mistake and not Monterey? Luckily no, we had just gone far south enough to find warm weather and fresh food.

A short walk away was a wine store where we bought a local bottle of Pinot Noir from Joyce Vineyards. Maybe it was the food, maybe it was camping at the top of a hill under a clear blue sky, but the food and wine were excellent. We only wished we could share it with our friends.

Did I mention the Calamari? I probably forgot the Calamari. Fried to perfection it accompanied us to each and every stall in the market. Sadly it did not make the wine market or the camping spot. We miss the Calamari.