I spent this weekend in Cambria, which was awesome. We had a lovely room with its own private porch/chairs area and an ocean view, and a little baby bunny was living in the bridge next to us. Adorable. Even more surprising for a beach town, it was actually rather warm and not icy wind chill factory-y. It was foggy-ish as rain was approaching on Saturday night, but most of the time it was sunny and amazing. I haven't been to Cambria in years and when I last went I think it was around Christmas, so the weather was a surprise.

Supposedly Mom wanted to "just hang out on the beach and relax" because we hadn't done that in Hawaii. I was privately thinking, "yeah, right," because (a) California beaches are usually iceberg cold, and (b) Mom is not a "sit around and relax" person at all. Well, we sort of did, since we had the beach chairs and it wasn't frigid. We did walk around the beach area and even found some shells in the morning. Our plan was to hang out in the morning and shop in the afternoon, but that did not go as well.

This area is apparently having worse drought conditions than everyone else in California? They have apparently gotten rid of street public toilets and replaced them with Porta-Potties and nobody wants to give water out to drink and they are even cutting down on the restaurant toilets. I was grateful they still allowed me to use a room toilet while I was at it. Mom wanted to meet up with some ex-locals she knows down there, and they said they were not allowed to water plants and had to spend $500 to get some kind of potable water tank that was too heavy to load into a truck in order to get any water for that. Hoo boy.

While Mom's friends were nice people, I was kind of annoyed that we essentially got one full day in the town to go shopping--and you know small towns, everything closes by 5--and the friends wanted to hang out and chat at their house for the entire afternoon until they had church at 5. I told Mom no, we could meet up after dark if necessary for a hangout, but if I only got a few hours to do this as is, I didn't want them all to be taken up by yakking. As usual, nobody listened to me on that score and it doesn't matter what I say about it because she will do what she will do and it wasn't like I could hike out that far from their house to hit the stores (of course they lived on the fringe of town).

We finally left about 4:15, which was earlier than I was expecting her to leave, but that still didn't leave for much. I did get to run into the yarn store for about 15 minutes before closing and hit a few stores that were open until six. I highly recommend going in Artifacts on the West Village side and Moonstones and the fancy glass gallery by Moonstones in the East Village.

We ate at the Moonstone Bar and Grill for lunch both days and went to Linn's on Saturday night, all of that was delicious. I have to especially give props to the crazy drinks that Moonstone serves up--and they gave me free champagne WITHOUT CARDING ME on Sunday. Go figure.

I was kind of freaking out on the way home because after we got back to Mom's, I'd still have to drive home for an hour and a half on top of that and ah, you know I gotta get home for The Good Wife and it airs early here. And of course we hit slowness and rain on the way back. And she had me call 511 on 580 on the way home and apparently leaving the old hometowne was all backed up and I would have been even later. To Mom's credit, she showed me a shortcut through the nearest town to get to 680 without having to go through all of that. I swear it was shorter, and it meant that I didn't have to go through the terrifying part of 580! I am so gonna do that from now on.

It was a lovely brief vacation. Too bad I had to come home, eh?

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