My first ever post!!

I decided Friday afternoon as the phones died down and the last few patients meandered into the doctors office I work at that the time had come for me to create a blog.  It is something I have been thinking about for awhile now for a variety of reasons... First and foremost,  I am horrible at keeping a journal these days, and thought if I had somewhere to write that was like I was writing to an actual person, maybe I would be more likely to write more often.  I've never been one to write anything really personal on Facebook for the world to see, but I think if I know that only people who really know me are on here, I will feel more comfortable being a little more real.  Secondly, I thought it would be a good way of keeping in touch with all you people I never see anymore now that I'm in California.  Lastly, I needed just a little creative outlet, and figured this would be a good place for it, emphasis on little.  Choose a template, download some pictures and write some stuff and you've got yourself a blog...

Every Saturday, we plug a different destination into our GPS, generally with no specific plans in mind.  It is the time I look forward to most in the week, exploring Orange County with my favorite person.  

We've all had the experience of stumbling into something amazing and, rather than pausing to soak it all in ourselves, instead feel the gaping emptiness of a person we care about; we wish they were there to share some of the amazing with us.  

One of my favorite things about being married is always having that person I want most to share the amazing with at my side when I come across such a situation.  

Three Fridays ago during my lunch break I was looking up cheap things to do for the fast approaching weekend.  I came across some underground band that was coming to some underground bar I knew nothing about called Alex's in Long Beach.  I was a little hesitant, but noticed there was a $5 dollar "suggested donation"and thought perfect, a couple of bucks will buy us a night of music.  

Predictably so, the parking lot of the bar found us in an extremely sketchy part of down town Long Beach.  The bar's plain black iron door had stood undetectable among a row of black iron doors,  and when we finally did find the right one, we sat in our car a good 15 minutes trying to decide if it was safe to go in; we spent the majority of the time calculating the white to every-other-race ratio to see if we would be welcome or not.  When we finally got the guts to go in, a gigantic bouncer with no neck carded us and informed us it would 10 dollars for the two us to get in, so much for "suggested donation." We decided it wasn't worth the money and walked slowly back to our little grey corolla feeling slightly defeated.  

Being resigned not to call it a night, we started looking up different "Night Life" points of interest on our GPS.  All sounded steep, but we decided to drive to the bar anyway because we had learned from the recording it was "located in beautiful down town Long Beach."

We weren't expecting much, but to our surprise, it took us to a lot larger city center than we expected or knew existed.  As we got closer, we saw hundreds of people on the streets.  We coudn't figure out what was going on.. turns out it was the weekend of the Grand Prix and everyone was out to party!

It was so much fun just to be down there with everyone even if we didn't know the first thing about Nascar.

We ended up coming across this amazing part of Long Beach all built on the river with twinkling lights, water taxis and even a light house.  It was so romantic to sit on the dock and overlook a seen we hadn't even known existed thirty minutes earlier.  That's what's so wonderful about this place, you never know where you'll end up...