Sunsets in the Bay Area always seem to be more dramatic than in other places we have been to but most of the time, we don’t have a camera with us. We stopped to take this snapshot when we were on our way to Target 
The de Young Museum was founded in Golden Gate Park in 1895 but the devastating earthquake of 1989 closed the museum down; so its re-opening last Saturday was a big event in San Francisco. The museum was open continuously for the week-end and admission was free. It was the longest line we have ever seen! The de Young collections include more than 25,000 works of art from around the world.
African art collection
Hand Blown Glass
Art work by a Nigerian artist, made with flattened aluminium bottle caps, sawn together with copper wires.
View of San Francisco from the de Young observation tower.
Reflection Pool
The historic San Juan Capistrano Mission was founded in 1776. The picture below shows the remains of the Great Stone Church which was the most magnificent structure in California until a massive earthquake struck in 1812.
Fountain
Laguna Beach Marine Life Reserve.
Laguna Beach mosaic chair
We haven’t been to a museum since last year when we visited the Louvre in France, so we decided to go to the Getty Museum in LA. We really enjoyed the Paper Art from Holland Exhibition. We hoped to take a nice sunset picture from the balcony of the Getty but it was too cloudy today…
We went to my company picnic in Saratoga Springs.
I flew this week-end to Orange County to visit Minh Chau. She will be in Southern California until December to finish her teaching credential. We took pictures of more paintings by Minh Chau that her parents have kept.
Welcome to our new website! After we got married and started adding more content, it just felt natural for us to change our domain name and the presentation to reflect our combined personalities better. We hope you will enjoy it!
To celebrate our up coming first wedding anniversary, we spent the week-end in Napa Valley. We woke up at 4:30am to drive to Calistoga to join an organized bike tour. Napa Valley is incredibly beautiful and fresh, smelling of luxurious trees and vines. Driving there was an absolute pleasure. Since we arrived early, we had breakfast in Calistoga in the morning. The town is charming and relaxing. After checking in, we started cycling through several vineyards and wineries. The first one we went to was Benett Lane. We found out they make chocolate wine sauce! After that, we went to Vincent Arroyo where some guy showed us the vineyard’s thirty year-old vines and explained his techniques for making wine. We tasted their chardonnay and merlot.
We then cycled to Cuvaison and had a picnic at their lovely vineyard. The sun was starting to break through; it was getting really hot. We cycled again and went to Frank Family and tasted their champagne which was supposedly one of Marilyn Monroe’s favorites. Frank Family Winery was our last stop and we decided to get back in our car to drive to Santa Rosa . Driving on highway 12 was … hard, very windy and narrow and steep sided, going uphill, downhill. But soon enough, we got the gear shifting right. We had a romantic dinner at Syrah, a really good French restaurant. Their crab cakes were divine! On Sunday, we took the long way home and drove all the way back to the Golden Gate Bridge on CA-1, stopping every now and then to take pictures.
We stopped at Bodega Bay, Tomales Bay and Stinson Beach. CA-1 is amazingly beautiful … but is even harder to drive than 12. There were some sharp turns where you would seriously either leap over into the ocean or off the mountain if you missed. Driving back in the crowded streets of San Francisco felt super easy.
Napa Valley was such a charming and romantic destination. I can’t believe it’s been a year since Minh Chau and I got married. If you’re wondering what’s like to be married, it’s the best thing that’s ever happened in my life!
The Taylor Woodrow Grand Prix held this week-end was one of the biggest events ever organized in San Jose. It would have been a shame to miss it, so we bought two tickets and went there on Saturday. Apparently, everyone else thought the same as there were 50 000 people in downtown San Jose on Saturday only and 150 000 total over the week-end. All the roads around the track were blocked so we took the lightrail VTA to get there. The main race is on Sunday and is a world championship race so we saw the smaller races on Saturday.
It was incredible to see cars going that fast on city streets and also super noisy, but we were prepared and brought our earplugs 
. One disapointment was that even though our tickets showed seat numbers, we didn’t get any seats. You had to buy the “Grand Stand” tickets to get seats! It was a big rip-off but since it was so hot that day, it was actually better to walk around to look for the shady spots. 
There were car exhibitions all over and concerts. Later in the day was the election of Miss San Jose Grand Prix. Overall, it was a fun event and it felt like San Jose is actually a big city. By the way, I’ve read it has recently replaced Detroit as the 10th largest city in the US.
We went to Monterey Bay Aquarium last Saturday, about an hour and half south from San Jose. After struggling to find a parking spot(we didn’t know it was such a touristic area) and waiting in line for an additional hour, we finally entered the aquarium. It didn’t look that big from outside but once inside we found plenty of things to see and admire! There were lots of variety of fish and other sea creatures. The aquarium is divided into two levels with some aquariums taking the entire two level height. We saw corals, rock fishes, jelly fishes, sea nettles and even sharks! There is one large aquarium that has yellowfin tuna. They were absolutely amazing!! The yellowfin tunas that we saw were so big and round; some of them were about six foot long. Sometimes, they would swim really close to the glass that we were able to examine their skin texture! Too bad it was too dark for us to take pictures of the giant yellowfin tuna. However, we got plenty of good pictures of the other sea animals. We thought it was an awesome aquarium, and a must-see for anyone in the Bay area.
This week-end, we drove to Southern California and took our nephew and niece to Newport Beach. They were very happy!
