by Ali Filippelli - posted from a friend's house in Portland, OR.

[click HERE to see full gallery]

So here we are in Portland, OR finishing up laundry, re-packing the car and getting ready to push off into Washington. I've been looking at our California photos over the past few days, trying to get them ready for our next blog post, all the while traveling through the amazingly/ridiculously lush, rocky, foggy Oregon Coast. I got a bit overwhelmed with it all - we spent nearly 4 weeks working our way up the Cali coast - with a dip inland to check out Kings Canyon. There are, to say the least - a 'fair' amount of photos. So what I've decided to do is break them up a little. This is here is going to be a SoCal Coastal edition. To follow will be a Kings Canyon Hiking edition and finally a NorCal Coastal edition...and as always we've put together a gallery on the side bar with brief descriptions.

Over 10 days we drove through San Diego, Encinitas, Leucadia, Carlsbad, Vista, Oceanside, San Clemente, Los Angeles, and Morro Bay. Stopping to see old friends and family along the way and and checking out the new cities as future potential abodes. Having lived in Brooklyn and then Dallas - could we transition to the beach/surf/sun life at the end of our travels? To be honest, as I look over our southern California photos I realize that for all our big plans to explore new cities we were really just chasing waves and the sunset everyday. Kaspar's brother-in-law had given him a refurbished fishtail surfboard in Mexico, so as we drove north - sticking to route 1 along the coast as much as possible, (with the new prized possession on the roof rack) Kaspar's eyes were on the waves.

We ended this section of the journey at the Morro Bay Skateboard Museum talking to Jack Smith (see more about the conversation @treibdesign) and hearing about some of his skateboarding milestones first hand.

Stay tuned for next time to hear about our wet adventure in Kings Canyon...

scenes from: SAN DIEGO...