Emily and Mitchell in the USA

Autumn is here! California loves 'the fall' even though it is absolutely no different to summer so far. I've been experimenting with vegan baking these past few weeks so I have a giant pot of applesauce to get through which works as a good egg replacement. So on Saturday I used it in some pancakes with a lot of cinnamon and we had some very tasty autumnal flavoured pancakes.  At the gardens, the botanist has broken her ankle and is out of action for six weeks so I've been helping out with what would have been some of her duties like feeding the turtles and watering all the big exotic plants in the greenhouse and dome. When we went into the greenhouse, we found that it was more than a one person job to maintain, so as well as the watering, we've been weeding everywhere and we'll start to rearrange and sort everything next week. I've had to up my days to three times a week so that we can take care of this project and I can continue with my herb garden project....

We had so many plans! But we think we found a cursed hiking trail and have therefore not been able to go out and do anything this week!  We were going to go on an early morning hike last Sunday, try out a new place for breakfast and then meet up with some of Mitchell's work friends in San Diego.  However.  We got up super early and were ready to go by 6:30am to hike before it got too hot and to catch the lovely morning light. We headed down to the car, got in, turned the key, and nothing happened! Well, it sputtered and all the lights flashed erratically at us, but the engine wouldn't turn on! Being 6:30am on a Sunday morning we couldn't exactly call out a mechanic (not without it costing A LOT) so we went back inside and I went back to bed for a few (four) hours.  We called a guy, but he wasn't free until Monday so we had a chilled inside day instead. We even went out for consolatory doughnuts in the evening at a bakery close to us which had the most enormous doughn...

This week we went and picked our own sunflowers! This trip was so much fun, we drove out to neighbouring city Irvine to a place called Tanaka Farms where they had a huge field filled with all different types of sunflowers. There were ones with giant blooms (which unfortunately didn't look so pretty, but maybe they would have if we'd caught them a week earlier) some smaller and medium sized ones and they had so many different colours! They ranged from a pale buttery yellow to a dark orangey red, and we tried to pick one of each!  We paid $5 to get in and then bought a special keepsake plastic vase which we were allowed to fill with fifteen blooms (although no-one was counting so we definitely could have snuck in an extra few). We spent about an hour there and had a great time looking at all the different varieties and trying to get some really good pictures.  Yes I wore the yellow dress specifically to blend in with the flowers It was pretty hot on the way back, but they surviv...

We went to a new beach this week! It's just a little further north than the one we've been to before and takes the same amount of time to get there with most of the same roads. We started in the Los Trancos parking lot which was nice and big and only $15 for the whole day which might seem a lot, but it's so nice not to have to scramble for a parking space in popular places and it had restrooms, maps and signs right to the beach!  The tunnel underneath the road was decorated with sea themed murals by local schools We started off by walking along the top of cliffs on the crystal cove trail. The vegetation was quite dry, being the end of summer, but we could see the state park on the left with the morning mist hitting the tops of the mountains and the sea stetched out to the right.  A misty start to the day We reached the end of the trail and took the route down to the beach. It wasn't too busy this far away from the parking lot and we settled down for a picnic and to read...