Grasshoppers!

Okay, so this being California, which is right next to Mexico, there are some decent Mexican restaurants to be found. One of them is El Tule - which is named after a town in Oaxaca (pronounced wahaka), Mexico. It comes as no surprise that this restaurant also serves up Oaxacan style Mexican dishes. One of these interesting dishes is grasshoppers! Well it's more of an appetizer you have with chips, but still - grasshoppers!


Earlier I had talked the talked about eating them, so I was keen on giving them a try. So how did they taste? Well they were a bit smaller than I anticipated, and the taste was something that I didn't expect either. I guess I was expecting a bit of a peanut buttery type taste.. Anyway, it was an interesting tangy and bitter flavour. Which went well with the chips and a bit of salsa :) Mmmmm!

Photos from San Francisco

In the weekend I also was up in San Francisco to redo some touristy stuff.

I was planning on going to see Alcatraz, however the only company that goes to the island was booked! :( So we took a cruise that went round the bay and paid particular interest to Alcatraz. We sailed under the Golden Gate bridge and the Bay bridge as well as circling round Alcatraz a couple of times. I was enlightened by bits and pieces of information as to how Alcatraz functioned and what life was like there, as well as what it was like building both bridges...

Banana Slugs!

Yes slugs that are yellow and remind people of bananas exist! I was fortunate enough to see and touch a couple yesterday when we went for a walk to see the coastal redwoods in the Santa Cruz mountains. Now I can cross seeing these creatures off my list :)

Grand Canyon Panoramas

I took lots of photos of the Grand Canyon and lots of them were so that I could make panoramas. I discovered a program called autostitch which stitches panorama pictures very well. You simply input the pictures you want stitched, and it will go away and stitch them all together without asking you for any further input! It works great in my opinion...

Grand Canyon

So with the arrival of my sibling, we headed off to the grand canyon! Simply put, the Grand Canyon really is a giant gaping hole in the ground, that is millions of years old, and to appreciate its size, you really need to experience it yourself.

We spent the full day at the south rim, going to pretty much every vista point, starting out in the west in the morning for sunrise, and finishing up on the east side for the sunset. Although we missed our bus to get to the intended point in the morning for the sunrise, the view was still quite spectacular -pronounced spec-taculARRrr.


We hiked down and into the grand canyon taking the hermit trail for about thirty minutes, had a yarn to a hiker, and walked back up. This was so that we could still get to see the rest of the canyon. They say it takes twice as long to walk up, as it is to walk down, but somehow in our case, we managed to walk up in the same time or less than we did going down. Maybe that recommendation was for when it's hot or something..

After a few hours thinking I had lost my keys (they turned up in my bed) during the morning's walk, we were over in the east side of the south rim for the sunset. The colour of the grand canyon does change with the sunlight which was cool. Anyway we finished driving back to our lodge, and apparently there were animals like deer, and coyotes, which I didn't see.. However when we were walking I think I found some mountain lion tracks..