Emily and Mitchell in the USA

 This week I signed up for some yoga classes in Downtown Riverside. I drive over after work to a nice studio little studio filled with plants and *good vibes*. I'm enjoying it and think I'll continue as they have different classes every day. It's a membership system, so I pay monthly and can then go to as many as I want to. I've done some yin yoga which is very stretchy and relaxing and some power yoga which was challenging and a pretty hard work out, but satisfying and exactly what I wanted from it. (I still hurt two days later!) When I was driving back on Wednesday though, there was thunder and lightning in a short summer storm. On Tuesday this week, we went for a bike ride with our friends. It was a 13 mile trail, but paved the whole way and relatively flat. It was very pretty cycling with the sun setting over the mountains and a cool evening breeze starting to pick up. It was pretty tiring for a first outing on my bike, but we all went for food afterwards to refuel....

 This weekend, we went camping in the woods for the first time this year. The snow melted in the mountains back in April, and what with my new job, this was the first weekend we manged to secure a spot.  We went to a new area, about halfway to San Diego, called Palomar Mountain State Park. It's quite a small area, but pretty all the same. The campground we'd found was very small, there was no-one to sign us in and there were only twenty sites. There were no showers and the toilets were pit toilets (just a bowl over an open pit). We had a tap by our site, and it was operated with a pump! Our site was hard to find at first, but we eventually found it and parked. We had to carry all of our equipment up a little hill to get it to the campsite, but once we were up there, it was super secluded and we couldn't see any other site around us. It was a very rural site compared to others we've been to, but we loved how in the middle of the woods it was, and that we had so much spac...

Hello! It's been hot this week, most days reaching 35 degrees or more. But, we do have a pool, which we made use of on Thursday after work for a quick swim.  I've also been out and very busy visiting libraries at work. I went to the biggest one in our system which is 35,000 square foot, and also one of the smallest, which was just one small room. The large one is on the top of a hill and has glass windows all along one side, so you can look out at the view while you read.  This one has the prettiest inside This one has the prettiest outside On Saturday, we drove over to a town called Cherry Valley, to go to the lavender festival.  They had relaxing music playing all around and it smelt lovely. Our first stop was some lunch, so we got some lavender tea and a fig, goats cheese and lavender pizza to share. We then went into the bread hall which was combination shop and sourdough museum. They had some samples and I tried some lavender olive oil and balsamic vinegar which was ...

This weekend, we had two completely different days.  Earlier in the week, we went to Art Walk with Mitchell's lab, which we hadn't been to for a few months. Mitchell picked out a really nice artwork by a local artist, so now we have a painting of a bridge and some cherry blossoms to hang up on our giant plain walls.  On Saturday we visited Lake Perris for the first time. It's super close to us, only about 20 minutes to get to and is a State Park right here in Riverside. We drove in, and weren't sure where to park as there's several sections. But we picked a random lot and found a space easily. There's a few beaches where people were swimming and setting up barbecues and a marina where loads of boats and jet-skis where setting off from. It was pretty noisy at this end with so many people, but it felt pretty festive with music playing and families in the water. I did go for a quick paddle, and while it wasn't as warm as Lake Elsinore was last year, it was stil...

This weekend we took a roadtrip to Santa Barbara!  It took us just under three hours to drive there on Saturday morning and we arrived in Isla Vista, the University of California Santa Barbara town, just in time for lunch. We parked on the street and began walking into the student area. It was good to know I didn't need the maps, even though it had been a while.  Our first stop was one of my favourites from when I studied there in 2015; Freebirds Mexican food! We got an enormous plate of nachos to share, and while Mitchell was skeptical about just one plate for both of us for lunch, after they'd piled on cheese, beans, rice, salsa and guacamole, he was pretty convinced. After we were full, we walked onto campus and looked around, and walked out around the lagoon to the campus beach. It was just as lovely as I remembered. I got a smoothie from blenders on the way out (which I also had very fond memories of) before walking the rest of the way around the centre of Isla Vista. We ...