***Please note that 99% of these pictures were taken in our moving car!!***

Saturday morning we were up early to finish packing our car. I don’t know if packing is the right word, it was more like cramming. When you try to fit all of your stuff in a tiny Honda Accord, it gets a little tricky. We managed to get everything in, take a last look around the apartment, and hit the road.

I’m not gonna lie…I did cry a little while we were pulling away. We were both sad. It also didn’t help that Justin played a Train song that I had told him would always remind me of San Diego. The song has nothing to do with a city, but I made the words fit :). It’s a really great song. Listen to it here.

Once we made it out of the city, we realized just how excited we were to explore San Francisco. We know that a part of us will fall in love with every city we visit, so it will always be a little hard to leave. That’s part of the trip though–learning to live in the moment and be joyful in each day we are given.

Our route took us up by Los Angeles, through Malibu and Santa Barbara, and finally to Monterey for the night. We were honestly blown away by how beautiful the drive was. For 80% of the trip we were sandwiched in between the mountains and the ocean. Gorgeous yellow and purple flowers covered the hillsides, grape fields could be seen for miles, and the endless blue ocean followed us the entire way. We decided everyone needs to make this drive at least once in their life. Yes, it’s that amazing.

Along the way we decided to make a couple stops. One of Justin’s favorite things to do is to visit other college campuses. It’s pretty interesting to see how other schools are set up. Our first stop was Pepperdine University in Malibu. We’d both heard it was a gorgeous school tucked in a hill overlooking the ocean and it definitely didn’t disappoint. It wasn’t really a school we could see being a student at–too ritzy for us–but it was beautiful none-the-less.

Our next stop was Santa Barbara. One of our favorite shows, PSYCH, is set in the city so we were excited to see what it was like. We only got to stop for about an hour or so, but we really wished we could have stayed longer. It’s not as big of a city as we had originally thought, but it’s gorgeous. It reminded us of a “downtown Decatur” area set in the mountains–really laid back and cutesy. We made a stop at The University of California at Santa Barbara and decided that we would enroll there in a heartbeat. Where else could you go surfing after class and then go hiking in the mountains the next day??

After a quick lunch, we continued up the coast. From Santa Barbara to Monterey there isn’t much civilization. Imagine being up in the mountains, winding your way for miles and miles. That’s what we did. For about 3 hours. Parts of the drive were a bit scary since you were up so high on cliffs, but it was more gorgeous than anything we had ever seen. We were both in dire need of a bathroom break by the end, and Justin was exhausted from driving such windy roads, but we were both incredibly happy we took this route. We could have taken an interstate that would have gotten us to Monterey about 1 1/2 quicker, but where’s the adventure in that??

My goofy husband "stretching".

We finally made it to Monterey, checked in to our hotel, ate dinner, and crashed for the night. Tomorrow we’ll post our arrival in San Fran!