A fabulous Girl’s Getaway Day 1 (Central Coast, CA)

I always LOVED these little creatures called sand dollars…and I never even imagined that I would be collecting so many of these on my recent girl’s getaway trip to the Central Coast area of California. Of all my years visiting various beaches throughout the US, this is the first beach where I saw so many of them. The image above are of all the different color sand dollars we collected during our walks on the beach. I looked up about these sand dollars and it seems there are several varieties and ours is the Western or Pacific sand dollars. I personally think these are the prettiest of all of them.

Our most relaxing and healing girl’s getaway was to the wonderful area of Moss Landing and Pajaro Dunes in Watsonville, California. The five of us first drove to Santa Cruz for lunch and then stayed in a cute beach cottage in Pajaro Dunes overlooking the ocean.

For some reason, being together with my California friends and enjoying some simple good times really made me so thankful for everything and realized how lucky I was in so many ways. I know people say this kind of thing all the time… But for me, this was something that was missing from my life lately. Being away on this trip made me realize how I have actually become quite a grumpy old woman lately…because I just could not get over my last couple years in Korea. I think I may have not really posted much about my times in Korea – honestly, I had quite a hard time there.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, my hard times there was not all simply because I was in Korea. I did miss my home in CA but I did enjoy some really fabulous Korean and other foods, re-experienced Korean culture, learned a whole lot about Korean food and most of all, really enjoyed spending time with my family and friends in Korea. But, with Coco (my dog) dying, with my own health issues (I still have scars from it…) and many other things like having a mid-life crisis..:))..things were not at all easy for me there. I don’t think I am ready to talk all about it yet – I may write more about this some day once I get a good perspective of all that has actually happened.

Anyway..this girl’s getaway trip ended up being truly therapeutic for me. Simply being silly with friends, just being free to do whatever..drinking wine while watching the sunset…all the things girls love to do, we got to do…

So, as I always do, I took pictures of restaurants, foods and picturesque settings. Hope you like them!

OK, now about food…

First day dinner was at Phil’s in Moss Landing. Their Cioppino is so famously good that Bobby Flay challenged Phil in his Thrown Down show and Phil actually won over Bobby Flay!!! Sadly, I only learned that AFTER I ordered this amazingly delicious Crab Fettucine –

My hands totally got messy trying to crack and eat the crab!! As you see here, I was totally ready to go to war with the crab.  I just needed to make sure I did not splatter tomato sauce all over my lovely girl friends… Hopefully I didn’t…did I, girls??

Honestly though.. crab fettucine was just really too delicious for me to worry about any of that! I think my friends had a good time just watching me eat.. :)) For dessert, we did a take out of Phil’s Chocolate Lava Cake and ate them back at the beach house with some wine to end the day. Oh! what a day!…I slept so well dreaming about finding more sand dollars the next morning and enjoying more good food in Carmel, CA.

Here’s a perfect sunset at Pajaro Dunes beach from my post on Day 2 –

Read more at A Fabulous Girl’s Getaway Day 2 !