Festivals Food and Fun!

Goodmorning!

Time for another blog, on this beautiful day!
It has been raining for three days now, but today finally the sun's coming out :) Two days ago, we went with all the helpers to Piaci's Pizza & Bar. They said that it would be the best pizza place in town and it was really good! So great that we went all together. We are with 8 helpers now, that's: Jesi, Jessica, Courtney, Cristobal, Chris, Megan, Andrew and me. At our pizza night we started to think of fun things in the area that we could possibly do together. Courtney told about the Hot Springs that are somewhere around Fort Bragg, and it would be awesome to find one and dive right into it (especially with the cold weather that's coming up, it would be delightful to bath in a 38 degrees natural hot spring!). So that adventure is still ahead of us ;) This week is the Festival of Lights in the Botanical Gardens, south of Fort Bragg. The Botanical Gardens are known as being absolutely beautiful and now at night they lid up thousands of tinhy lights in the trees, so I'm very excited to see that.

We've been working for three days now on our so called 'Project Library'. Vivien, the inkeeper likes to call the tasks we do 'projects'. But Project Library is really a project and a big one!! We looked through all the books in the family room and divided them into different sections such as: poetry, art books, history, languages, dictionaries, gardening books, cook books, children books, traditional books, fiction, non-fiction, etc. So a big project, but we are almost done with this one.

Yesterday I took a walk with Jessica through Fort Bragg, to take a look at all the shops that are here. The've got so many great places to eat, that it's really difficult to decide where to go next, haha. They've got great breakfast and lunch rooms, coffee bars, old cafes, international food, ice cream, chocolate companies and many more. But it's just great to get some inspiration from the restaurants, because maybe later on I can transfer their meals and recipes into one of my own. It's a little town, but there is actually something to do every single day. Tomorrow is a Christmas parade for example and you can always very easily visit Mendocino from here, which I heard is the cutest village ever.

Yesterday, Jessica, Andrew, Courtney, Cristobal and I joined a trivia (trivial pursuit) night at the local Cliff House Restaurant. You had to sign up your team at 6.30 pm sharp (up to 5 persons), with an entrance of $10 per team, which at the end went to charity. At 7 pm round 1 started and we, the 'Go Go Quiz Knights' were on first place after the first two rounds! But then our genious minds lost power and we ended up on 5th place after four rounds, haha. The guys were quite competitive, so they didn't really take it as well as we did, but it was really so much fun :P

And guys, I made traditional Dutch 'HUTSPOT' for the entire house, and they all very much liked it :D Tonight, before we go to the Botanical Gardens, Cristobal is making a huge pan of Paella for 11 people, so very excited for that!
This morning me and Megan went to the Skunktrainstation, to buy ourselves the Christmastrain tickets for this saturday. The ride with the Christmastrain is a 90 minute roundtrip through the redwoods together with Santa, hot chocolate and cookies (if you have pajamas, you should wear them haha). We are both so excited to go, it will be lots of fun. Sadly my roommate Megan is leaving soon, hopefully she will be around so I can visit her another day. But there are always helpers coming in and out, and we can all get along. Especially from next week on we will need some, because the Christmas is coming up soon.

Now I am going for a run, have to keep up the energy ;)
Keep reading, my dear blogees!

Lots of love,

Charlotte