Road Trip

Reader, Lizh and I went to the central coast for a few days. We were super excited about the hotel's hot tub. Liz kept saying HOTtub in a way I didn't get because I had never see this Eddie Murphy SNL skit:



Along the way we acquired a trip mascot. Bionicle was the "boy toy" in my Happy Meal. The "girl toy" was a lameass pink My Pretty Pony. You can see why I chose Bionicle to be my boy toy:
















The first few days the weather was crap, so we laid low and logged a lot of time in the HOTtub.





Liz relaxes with Oprah.

















Bionicle enjoys the frescoes in the HOTtub room.








The Mama had given me the book Twilight which I was eager to dig into. I snagged a Harlequin Intrigue book Rogue Soldier from the hotel library and need to share a bit of it with you.

This book involves Tessa Nielsen and Mike McNair, former Special Forces agents. McNair "took her virginity" then disappeared out of Tessa's life until far-fetched circumstances throw them together again. Tessa wants to hate him but naturally her loins are secretly aflame with smoldering desire. McNair feels the same way but since he's a man we don't glean much of his emotional state, just that thinking of Tessa causes his pants to become crowded.

Their lust simmers for 228 pages until they allow it run wild but only after Tessa's left-field confession of childhood molestation by a family friend. I guess McNair's appropriate reaction was meant to assure us that he's a Good Guy after all and therefore Okay to Bang.

"He dipped his head and placed a row of kisses along her crooked collarbone first, then the straight one. The gesture brought to mind the incident that had broken the bone, her wrestling match with the alligator the day before her Special Forces career had ended before it began."

I'm already dying with laughter; not a great start to a sex scene. Then I encounter multiple uses of the word buttocks. Gah. Can we please just strike this word from the English language? It's hideous and barely belongs in a doctor's office; it belongs nowhere within a 100 mile radius of a sex scene.

I guess these types of soft-core books can't use explicit but time-honored Anglo Saxon language so they have to resort to cringe-inducing lines like:

"Then the core of his heat sprang against her skin, rigid and swollen ... then he finally shifted again and pressed his hard tip against her wet core."

Awful. I had to stop after the multiple, frothing and simultaneous orgasms since I didn't really care about the evil-doing Russians, stolen nuclear warheads and something about sled dogs.

But little did I know that this was great compared to Twilight, where no one is getting any. That's going to be its own post some other time, so stay tuned.



Moving on. Christmas Eve we went out for a very mediocre Chinese meal featuring spongy meat of mysterious origin. Were we really eating cat? Wheat gluten? We crossed our fingers for no gastrointestinal misadventures. The baby Jesus heard our prayers.






Christmas Day we went to see Milk. What a great movie. I felt super privileged to benefit from the hard work of these righteous queers. Sean Penn did a fantastic job and Emile Hirsch, so moving in Into the Wild, totally brought it in his performance as Cleve Jones.

The day after Christmas we went to Hearst Castle. Neither of us had ever been and despite being meh about traipsing around the houses of the rich and famous, totally enjoyed it. Both of us wondered if any of the gushing tour guides or the adoring movie would mention the fact that both Hearsts were kind of pricks. They didn't. If you've seen Deadwood, then you know Hearst Sr. is depicted as an exploitative, union-busting asshat. If you've seen Citizen Kane, then you know it is based on Hearst Jr's life and he was also kind of a ruthless unlikeable guy. But he sure did build a nice house. And the best part? The indoor pool:















Then we poked around a cute town called Cambria and ate chicken pot pie. And olallieberry pie. And came to consensus about the rightness of pie.

The next day was our last day. The weather was incredible. We went to Morro Rock, which is ginormous and really old. 21 million years? Old.















Then we saw lots of sea lions doing their thing. For some, that was hardly moving. For others that was bitching and belching at the other sea lions. I can relate to that.















Then we ate excellent fish and chips. I took a bunch of pictures of the water and some wannabe arty-farty pictures of the sand but they didn't come out so good and just couldn't hold a candle to this:






Anini Beach, Kauai.
We're so not there right now.
Sigh.







Then we proceeded to wine taste at two of the bazillion wineries around Paso Robles and I discovered two important things. Mourvedre is damn good. And Petite Syrah is nothing like Syrah and is incredibly delicious. If you go down there you should go to Pipestone Vineyards. Not only are they very welcoming but their whole operation is solar, organic and sustainable and! They use draft horses to till their fields and the whole farm is set up using feng shui. Sometimes I really love California.