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california places to go

Idyllwild, CA – ’09

jared and i just visited idyllwild this weekend so i thought it would be fun to share a travel installment from the first time we went there four years ago! i’m not exactly sure why or how we decided to go to idyllwild that time, but we had so much fun that we’ve been twice since! we don’t do winter sports, we love quaint small towns and it’s only 1.5 hours away. we brought chains just in case, but since we’re newbs to driving in snow we didn’t know how to put them on. turns out that by the time we got up there it was already dark and there was snow and ice everywhere. so, in the dark and in falling snow, we pulled over and jared worked on putting on the chains for the first time. we couldn’t really figure it out and about 5 miles down the road one of them fell off. so then, in the dark and the falling snow we had to go hunting for our fallen chain. we found it, put it on again, lost it two more times, put it on two more times and finally made our destination.

we found these little cabins that are so fun! they are a little ghetto inside, but the outside is really cute and they have a wood burning fireplace! we were especially just happy to be there finally and not driving anymore. and there was falling snow!!!! i can count on one hand the times i’ve seen falling snow in my life (my favorite being on another trip i’ll blog about later) and so it’s pretty exciting for us to experience it 🙂 that night we heard all sorts of wildlife having a party…love the forest!

in the morning, we awoke to a winter wonderland. it was seriously magical! i liken it to the feeling people get when they see the ocean for the first time. the back door to our cabin opened up to a virtually untouched hill of pure snow full of animal prints, evidence of the noises we heard all night. we ended up making snow angels back there, something we hadn’t done since childhood.

this was definitely a first. good thing we were staying one more night and didn’t have to deal with this until the next day!

seriously…amazing! the powder from the night before softly falling through the air. a beautiful taste of heaven.

 hmm, really smokey?

i kinda want to live here someday so that i can have my name on a sign, how fun!

suicide rock

playing in the snow! that’s right, we wore our snow pants all weekend! [being married, you always have to prepare for a snowball or getting tackled in the snow]

this bear looks awesome with a fanny pack. reminds me of the time we thought it would be funny to try to bring fanny packs back…[future blog post] 😉

along with enjoying the beauty and wonder of the snow and forest, we thoroughly enjoyed the funky shops in this town. there are some seriously awesome things for sale, like this!

or these…

but i think our very favorite thing was people watching. anyone ever watch the show portlandia? we kinda think that people believe that the dream of the 90’s is alive in idyllwild 🙂

also, notice the top right photo below…that is jack nicholson…well so we thought. i even posted this to get opinions from people and it was about 60/40 that it WAS him. well a year after we went on this trip, we went again and were bragging to someone in the coffee shop that ‘we saw jack nicholson last year when we were up here’. the guy who we told said, ‘no you didn’t, that guy is a local here and everyone thinks it’s him but it’s not’. embarrassing!! haha. and recently some of our photographer friends told us the same thing, and that apparently he buys into it and lets people take pictures with him and buy him drinks. so look out for nack jicholson [that’s what we’re calling the fake jack nicholson] if you’re ever up there 🙂

on the way back down the hill, we built a snowman on the car to see how long it would last 🙂 surprisingly it lasted quite a while (see video below)! 

had to pull over and mocktography these guys! so so random! since we were back up there this weekend, we wondered if we’d see these guys again, but sadly they are gone. good thing we stopped when we did!
every time…..
 and here’s the silly video we made of this trip. yup, we’re total dorks and here’s the proof:

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