First Day in Our New City

We made it! We don't have a permanent address yet but I still say we are officially Californians.

Our flights weren't too bad yesterday, we did pay a little extra to sit in the Economy Plus seats on United for the second leg of our trip - Chicago to San Diego. Basically you just have more leg room which was really nice for Ty on the 4 hour flight. I'm short so it just gave me more room to wiggle around :)

Our friend Caroline picked us and all of our luggage up from the airport last night. Caroline was one of my best friends in college, she grew up here in San Diego and was our wonderful tour guide when we came to visit last year. She also introduced me to the wonders of wine while visiting Monticello one Saturday afternoon, and we all know where that has lead!

Some how we missed her in the terminal but she had flowers and a gift to greet us! She also had her camera all ready to take our "welcome home" picture, we really must have walked right past her. But all of our luggage arrived and Caroline got us to our friend Jay's apartment where we will be staying until we find our own place.

The flowers she brought us made us feel right at home and so did the sweet welcome gifts Jay had left for us (he was in class when we got in)

Wine for me :)

Ty's favorite beer with lime for him!

Jay knows us too well! We are so lucky he is letting us take over his brand new apartment for a while. It's in a great area and it's adorable. Moving across the country is so much easier when you have great friends to help you out!

We were really hungry after the flight and craving tacos, so Caroline took us to a little place called Verdes in La Jolla. Apparently the owners' last names are Green and that is why they named the restaurant Verdes (which is Spanish for green, one of the few vocab words I remember from high school). Since that is also our new last name I'm sure I'm going to want to go there all the time. Ty got a burrito and I had a delicious carnitas taco (pulled pork) and of course Caroline and I got margaritas. One of the things I love about the Mexican food out here, besides that is tastes so much fresher, is that they serve corn tortillas! For whatever reason, those are really hard to find at restaurants in Virginia.

After dinner, the time change and all day traveling finally started to catch up with us. I slept like a rock until 7am when the driver called and said he'd be dropping off my Jetta in 15 minutes! Even without a full 8 hours of sleep, I think my body thought it was 10am and I had no problem hopping out of bed. We had to walk two blocks to meet the driver, his big 18 wheeler was tough to maneuver on side streets, but she made it:

Ty was basking in the early morning sunshine.

We got really lucky that the car came right when we did, now we're free to roam around and get to know the area as well as hopefully look at apartments.

Our first trip out was to the grocery store. We're on a really tight budget now so we just wanted to get a few basics. Jay recommended a store down the street that reminded me a lot of Ellwood Thompson's in Richmond. It's called Sprouts Market (I think it's also called Henry's the website was a little confusing) and across the street from it there is also a Trader Joe's. I love Trader Joe's but this trip we just stuck to Sprouts.

We spent $39 and got all of this:

Which should last us at least through the weekend and early next week. By the time we got back from the store and took a walk around the neighborhood, we were starving for lunch so I assembled some awesome sandwiches if I do say so myself:

Turkey, ham, cheddar, lettuce, tomato, avocado with ranch dressing on whole wheat sub rolls. YUM. Until we get settled more we'll probably stick to easy meals like this. We bought pasta, sauce and salad stuff for dinner tonight (including a Shiitake Ginger dressing that was on sale!) and eggs to make for breakfast. I'm really excited to get back into eating fresh foods out here, the past few weeks especially we haven't eaten well at all. With the wedding, where we ate out most nights while we were in Ocracoke, and then moving and not wanting to buy a bunch of food we wouldn't eat, we've been eating a lot of junk...and we can both feel it!

Ok, back to the apartment hunt and possibly just a drive around with the windows down in this beautiful weather :)