Saturday: Eating our way up the West Coast

Saturday was "Beach Day." Though ironically, we never actually made it on the beach.

We started with a trip to Venice Beach where the crowd was definitely unique to say the least. Lots of musicians, skate boarders, and doctors. And by doctors, I mean "doctors." "Doctors" that sold "Medical" Marijuana. They even had their own stores. Lots of them. Yes, I am serious. And no, we did not walk on that side of the street. :-) We ate lunch at this place called The Cow's End where I had a great BLT wrap with blue cheese. Yummy.

We walked around for a while longer and then went back to the car to head up the coast. Next stop was the Santa Monica Pier.


I bought a few knick-nacks for the kids, but it was super crowded being a Saturday, so we stayed just a bit and decided to check out how the other half lives.

In other words- Malibu.

Jennifer Aniston- here I come!

Forget a "Star Homes Tour" bus. We had smart phones and Google.

As we drove around Malibu and through the Hollywood Hills, I spent much time googling road names + celebrity homes. With that, we are fairly certain we drove by both Dean Cain's and Will and Jada's homes. Score!

Some unexpected heavy traffic made our trip to Malibu a few hours longer than we expected it to be, so we went straight to dinner.

An experience I had been waiting for.

Korean BBQ

Korean BBQ is a pretty cool Melting Pot meets PF Chang's experience where you receive sauces, rice paper, some random sides, a green salad, potato salad, and then you choose your (raw) meats to cook on a griddle in the middle of your table. It's all you can eat and you start with 4 meats and can ask for more after you finish what you have. We started with marinated pork BBQ (yum), beef BBQ (yum), pork belly (kinda like bacon- yum with sauce in a rice paper), and spareribs (yum yum). We then added chicken (nothing special) and squid (Eric and Caroline's favorite. I tried it- not a yucky taste, just a weird rubbery texture.).

Caroline had much enjoyment in cutting the squid with scissors while Chad was utterly grossed out.

Though we were stuffed to the gills, we had a very important experiment to conduct.

Do the cupcakes that you can get after hours from the Sprinkles Cupcake ATM machine taste as good as the cupcakes you get fresh from the store?
That's right, folks. As if California couldn't get any cooler, they now have CUPCAKE ATM MACHINES.

OMG.

Fatness 24/7.

Someone slap me because that was the most awesome thing ever.
I went to sleep very happy (and very full) that night. :-)