Graham and Niki Newell: Fun weekend in CA

We really had a fun weekend this past weekend, and it was well documented...so it definitely deserved a post! I had been testing out the video capabilities of our camera so you'll get to see a few here. Since I talked so much about biking in the last blog and especially about the hill I decided to film Graham biking up the hill to Bobby and Ethel's house so that you could get a better idea.

I don't know if you can really tell how hard it is...but it's pretty hard. Luckily, each time we do it, it gets easier.

On Friday Graham and I went with Bob and Ethel down to Redwood City's Theater District to see some free live music. Graham and I had discovered this earlier when we went to see a U2 cover band. This week it was big band music. So we packed a picnic dinner, a bottle of wine, and some lawn chairs and enjoyed a nice evening of live music. To top it off....the band must have known that there were some Hokies in the crowd because they played "Enter Sandman" the song that is played during every home football game when the team enters the field. Although this genre was not their strong point I recorded it anyways for you guys to enjoy.

On Saturday we headed down to Half Moon Bay with Bob and Ethel. Here we enjoyed a long walk on the windy beach. The wind made it very chilly, so unfortunately it masked the fact that I was getting sun burned. During our walk on Miramar beach we got to watch some Kite Surfers. This looks like a really fun sport, but I think you need a lot of upper body strength to do it. We took a video of this guy getting some air, because it was pretty awesome. The first time he got air I screamed because I thought the wind got a hold of him and he was going to get blown away. Even slightly more cool was that the guy just so happened to come out of the water after we filmed him and asked Graham to help him take down his kite. So even though in the video you can't see the kite, you will get to see it in the pictures!

After that we headed further down Half Moon Bay to go to the tide pools. Here there were a lot of Seals sun bathing on the beach and swimming in the water. So neat!! They have the beach marked off so that people don't get to close and scare away the seals from their natural habitat. Here in the tide pools, Ethel says you can sometimes find Starfish. I really wanted to see one and take a picture for my mom...but today was not the day for them I suppose.

Then we did a short hike to a distillery and had some drinks and appetizers and we watched the sun start to set. We enjoyed lots of good conversation with our Aunt and Uncle and it was just so beautiful and comfortable sitting out there.

And to top the weekend off, on Sunday we had a family wine tasting. What an experience!! Uncle Bobby is semi-serious about these things, mostly because he likes to know what wines people like with out having the bias of brand or price. The wine tasters were myself, Graham, Uncle Bobby, Matt, and Natalie. Uncle Bobby purchased 6 different wines ranging from $8-$55 dollars. Then Aunt Ethel would wrap them up in paper bags and mark them with a letter. We then had to fill out two scoring sheets as we tasted the wine. It was a really fun experience and we probably didn't do it the right way, considering we didn't spit out the wine and we were eating different foods during the wine tasting. What we found was that Matt and I had similar tastes, that were totally opposite from that of the rest of the group. We also found out that we don't really have that good of a pallet for the different types of wines and were wrong about each one. AND we also noticed that none of the wines stood out as particularly bad or particularly good to all of us, so basically the $8 wine was pretty much just as good as the $55 wine. So that was the experience and now we go on south beach tomorrow :).