I am forcing myself to get through our travel photos from our anniversary coastal road trip to California because my personal photos always take the backseat to client work and sadly they never make it to this blog! I definitely make every effort to sit and relax and enjoy every moment on the trip and keep a lot of photos for our personal album but it’s always fun to give readers a taste of our adventures and share the things we loved and want to do a million times over! Since we started dating, travel has been important to us. We often have to choose our travel wisely because Drew only has ten days of vacation time to use throughout the year so each day needs to work for us and we have to choose our adventures with the time crunch in mind! When we were thinking about what we wanted to do together, a million places came to mind: Portland, Nashville, Boston… but we ended up decided on taking a road trip up the Californian coast from LA to San Francisco! We’ve both been to California but both for work so this was our chance to really explore and take advantage of our rental car!

Our trip started off a tiny bit bumpy when we missed our connection in Houston! We made the most of it by grabbing a dinner at the airport and only got in a few hours later (which stunk, but oh well!) We picked up our Alamo car and hit the road to our first airbnb that happened to be a micro loft right outside of Hollywood! By the time we got to our place and settled it was 10pm (shoot!) but we ventured out and grabbed a drink and gator tots at a local bar on Hollywood Blvd and then finished the night at the Roosevelt Hotel (a place I visited in June) and shared a delicious milkshake at 25 Degrees. I was exhausted so we cabbed back to our place and called it a night!

The next morning we slept in, got ready, and walked back to Hollywood Blvd to see it in the daylight. It was so fun to venture around, grab some coffee, and see all of the tourist-y sites. We ended our morning with brunch at bpd where I had the crab cake eggs benedict (YUM!) and then hit the road to see the Hollywood sign up close and personal. Now, it is not an easy feat, there will be signs to tell you to turn around but somehow we navigated the Hollywood hills using nothing but our own sense of direction (no thanks to you, Siri) and we got a close glimpse of the sign before hitting the road to our next stop: Santa Barbara!

The drive from LA to Santa Barbara started with a lot of traffic but we ended up hopping on the coastline which added time to our travel but gave us gorgeous views. We totally stumbled upon the Malibu Cafe and absolutely loved our stop. We grabbed a drink, ate delicious pretzels with beer cheese, and walked around their space before hitting the road again! It was the perfect in between stop and it’s actually where The Biggest Loser was filmed, definitely worth a visit! We made one more pitstop when we saw an adorable beach cluttered with surfers and we sat and watched for a few minutes and stretched our legs before finishing the drive to El Capitan! LA was wonderful but it was so nice to get out of the city and into the country! Up next we will talk about our time at El Capitan, one of my favorite places on planet earth!