Blessings all around SB

I woke up this morning feeling MUCH better than I had yesterday. Going to bed at 930 probably helped in the whole "not getting more sick" thing. After almost 12 hours of sleep, I woke up to no plans for the weekend. Brett is gone again, off to Palm Springs for the Indian Wells tennis tourney with Kyle....yes, I wanted to go, but it was a boy's weekend. Boo.

Laura had grand plans of starting to pack for her upcoming move.....but it was too pretty of a day outside, so we decided to head to the Farmer's Market. I didn't have anything that I needed to get, but I just enjoy walking around and seeing all the fresh goodies.

We ran into several friends while we were there, and all of them had plans to head to the Valley for wine tastings. We met up with Leslie, Jeremy and Molly, and decided to join them for brunch.

Instead of my normal order of pancakes and eggs with bacon....I saw "The Liz Taylor" and thought to try it! Laura almost fell out of her seat when she heard me order the fruit instead of the potatoes for the side. :) I even ate most of it...everything except the bananas.

It was a great morning hanging with the Hui family at Beachbreak.

While we were walking around the market and on the way to breakfast, we thought that we should join everyone else and go out to the Valley for the afternoon too! So, LB and I came home, got all cleaned up, and drove out the beautiful drive on 154 to Los Olivos.

Right at the intersection of 154 and 246, the flowers were crazy beautiful!!! Of course we had to stop and take some pictures. It reminded me of all the people in TX that did the same to get some snapshots with the bluebonnets.

We had a group of folks there grab a shot of us, and we did the same in turn. The patch was so fun, and man, oh man, the sky was so blue!! Such a beautiful day!

We arrived at Sunstone and ran into Vanessa and some friends. We did the quick wine tasting, courtesy of the Axxess card....2 for free....score!! On our way out, I saw this kitchen, and knew that I'd see LB in one like this one day. Start saving up, Benny. :)

When we were stopping for a quick restroom break, we noticed Bob and Brenda. Laura and I were in a homegroup together that met at their house, and we hadn't seen them in quite some time. They mentioned that they were heading up to Figueroa Mountain to see the wildflowers, and thought that we should definitely do the same as it's one of Laura's last weekends in SB.

So, we bid goodbye to B&B and decided to follow their lead. We stopped at the local grocery, grabbed some crackers, cheese and chocolate, and found our way to Figueroa Mountain road. The drive out there was gorgeous. The fields were so green!

Also, along the way, there was a huge field of the yellow flowers that I love so much. I guess I should find out what they are called...but regardless, I do love them so!

We finally got the winding part of the road, and kept going. We kept going, up, up and up, and passed a few signs that let us know that we were in the right spot.....although, we weren't finding this field of flowers that Bob went on and on about. So, we kept driving.

At one point, I had to stop so I could get out and take a photo of what we WERE seeing. It was absolutely gorgeous....even though there were still no flowers. When I opened the door to my car at this spot, it was so windy, that my car door flew open and I honestly thought it was going to break and blow right off the hinges. I popped out to take a few shots, and it was SOOOO cold. When I got back in the car, I realized that it had dropped....or we had driven UP enough....to where it was only 45 degrees now. It had been 65 at the bottom of the mountain before we starting climbing.

At one point, we did drive by a small bit of flowers....but it was hardly what we thought would have been worth the drive, so we kept going further. After about another 10 minutes, we thought that we must have missed it, so we started back down. On our way down, we drove past Bob & Brenda. He said that we were so close, that we had to go back.

So, we turned around and followed them. When they pulled off to the spot that we had passed earlier, he got out and was shocked. Bob ran up the hill to see if there was more on the other side, and came back down to us where he said "I am so embarrassed!! I promise you that there have been flowers here before!".

We all had a good laugh about it, and decided that it was a good idea for all of us to go into Los Olivos for a little bit of dinner.

We stopped at one more spot before we made it to the bottom of the mountain. The sun was setting and it was a gorgeous sight!

Look at the view behind us....AMAZING!!!

We found one of the only spots in Los Olivos that was open still, and decided to sit down, get a nice bottle of wine, and have some appetizers. It ended up being a really wonderful evening full of friendship, conversations and wonderful fellowship.

Today was a day that Laura and I didn't expect. We woke up with no plans. We had a wonderful day, full of many blessings, and even if we had tried, we wouldn't have been able to plan it any better.