A nice weekend...

You know, sometimes you just have a nice weekend.

No frills.  Nothing super fancy or different.  But just a nice weekend.

We need more of these.  Desperately.  With the exception of our perfectly lovely wedding - 2022 has been another rough year.  For all of us.  Truly seems pandemic fatigue, politics, our society, our economy is just not getting out of this ugly rut we're in.  Many friends and family and ourselves included are going through some really rough personal stuff.  We've had more loss.  It's been damn hard. 

But - we keep trekking.  We keep our heads up.  I wanted to take just a moment to remember and to share - just a good weekend.

Friday night our little adventure group hit up the Ghost Tour at the Heritage Museum in Santa Ana.  This was extra special because my dear friend Darcy has just started leading these tours!  She's amazing at it.  She loves ghosts, and history, and is a theater kid so she nails it.  And she did on Friday night.  Such a lovely tour of a really cool house and story!

We all arrived at our tour time of 8pm and got to wander the grounds a bit.  They're truly beautiful and I plan for us to come back in the day sometime to explore even more!  We chatted a bit about the Gospel Swamp Farm and the Maag Farmhouse, then into the Kellogg House we went!

Unfortunately my triggers and moms vertigo do not like houses that move.  Since this house was moved from a prior location it's a bit unstable to us sensitive folk.  Luckily neither of us got ill, but mom had to stay downstairs and listen to the upstairs tour rather than join us on the 2nd level.  And as long as I was leaning on a wall or a door frame I seemed to fair ok.  Sigh.  Stupid conditions.  Anywhoo - other than that it was so much fun and so full of very cool historic history!

 

The neat circular dining room (mom had those chair, and noticed she seriously had so many of the same things that were in this house...LOL)

The Kellogg House at dusk

Helen Kellog

Hiram Clay Kellogg put a ships mast through the middle of the house!

Creepy Dolls

The kiddos room

Creepy stroller in the attic, which was really interesting and all open

Mom listening from below

That's my friend!

Well this is just beautiful

Pretty walkway

Kellogg House

We had such a great time!  

The crew!

On Saturday Pat and I decided to do a new hike!  It was a bit of a drive, but we had no plans whatsoever so we had all the time in the world!  So we headed down to SJC (Almost Lake Elisnore) to Sitton Peak.  This is a very long windy drive down Ortega Highway (I never knew it went so far!).  Pat decided we'd hike to the 4 corners and then turn back rather than go up to the peak since we were out of hiking shape and it's a good thing we did just that, because the almost 6 1/2 mile hike we did do, kicked our asses!

It was a perfect day to hike.  Overcast most of the day.  The trail was so pretty!  A steady slow up hill pretty much the whole time (I guess we hit 1700 elevation) and just lovely.  I only found 1 geocache at the trailhead, which I forgot to take a photo of, but at least I got one!  The trail was green and there were lots of different pretty flowers scattered about. Even though we were pretty beat up afterwards, it was well worth it!

Never seen a sign in for a trail!

1st hike as husband and wife!

Just so pretty!

Water droplets!

Then on Sunday morning I had brunch with one of my favorite humans.  We tried a new place that just opened called Mimosas Kitchen and Bar.  Bottomless Mimosas of course.  Then we got a dozen oysters - delicious!  The little ones from Canada.  Then I got an Ahi Avocado toast with a mango salsa that was just delightful.  Now that Julie has officially downloaded the geocaching app - we of course hit up a couple in the parking lot!

So there ya have it!

Just a lovely wonderful weekend of fun!