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california places to go

Paso Robles, CA – ’11

 

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we have a little [not so little] camera collection that we’ve been adding to over the years. some were passed down to us by family, some were given as gifts and some we found in random antique shops. we’ve been playing around with some of these old cameras and seeing what they can do!

we love going to paso robles and have been there a few times. this time in particular we ditched the digital cameras and hunted around our brains for how to shoot film again. it was fun to just be in practice of thinking of every photo before taking it, and then the thrill of seeing what turned out later!

the color film is is from a camera from the 40’s or 50’s and the black and white film is from a camera from the 70’s

enjoy, i’ll let the photos speak for themselves!

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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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california places to go

Bottle Tree Forest, CA – ’11

turns out we should probably collect old men who collect…we went up to visit the house where jared lived for a couple years as a kid up in the high desert. along the way we discovered this gem. elmer long has been doing this for over 20 years. like leonard at salvation mountain, word got out and people started sending him their bottles. he also collects other antiques and found items to crown his trees.

here’s the architect…

elmer gave us a tour and told us some stories behind the treasures

elmer calls this the $60,000 sax. it was his son’s for music school…

apparently there used to be a bagdad, ca..but no longer

here’s jared’s old house

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california places to go

salvation mountain – ’09

here’s another travel from ’09 a little closer to home. we decided for our 2nd anniversary that we would do the same thing as our first anniversary, camping in julian. one of the days we decided to do a day trip to the salton sea. we’d been there before, and i’ll post pics of that at some point. this time, we drove around the entire sea and found this gem (with a little tip from our friends at zelophoto).

this guy leonard broke down here in the 80’s, felt that it was meant to be and decided to not only stay but also build on and paint the hillside. he gets donations of paint and bales of hay and this is his creation…enjoy!

we got a pic with leonard, he’s a pretty sweet old guy, i was already on the ‘tour’ when he grabbed my arm and asked me to join the tour…two different times, haha

**2012 update: leonard no longer lives on the mountain, he’s now in a home and others are protecting his work of art: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/sep/27/hoping-to-save-salvation-mountain/ glad we met him when we had the chance 🙁

it’s surprisingly sturdy!

i love that we caught him checking his mail, does the mail really come all the way out to the middle of nowhere?!

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california places to go

Scranton…LA?

Ok, so this is totally random, but we’re big fans of the show The Office and we happened to find out where they shoot the show. So on our way up to a fun long weekend in Paso Robles we stopped to take some pictures of the building! (It’s actually in LA, not Pennsylvania…)

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Here’s the “Scranton Business Park” with Dwight’s car on the left…

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california places to go

Photo Friday #7

So because the clip in the video is quick, I’ve had some people say that it wasn’t Jack Nicholson that we saw. So I’ve cropped the picture so you can take a closer look and see for yourself…So, what’s the vote? Is it him or isn’t it?