I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since Andrew and I got married! On top of that, we’ve been together for 5 years. Crazy, right? And yes, we actually have only one date for when we started dating officially, and when we got married. This was definitely on purpose since I don’t really want to have to manage two different dates, haha. While we didn’t do a full on weekend celebration right on our anniversary (April 1), we still got to do a foodie date night on that date. We opted to do our weekend celebration one week later due to some of our obligations. To celebrate, Andrew made the awesome suggestion to do a mini getaway to Monterey, CA. It was a quick weekend, but we got to do a lot of things without it feeling too packed or stressful.
The food
First, let’s talk about food! One of the things we love to do whenever we travel is explore food and coffee places in the area. All of the places we ate at were all really good! For the first night, we had dinner at Rosine’s Resturant followed by dessert at Revival Ice Cream. At Rosine’s, I had the Sicilian Breaded Meat, which is filet mignon breaded in seasoned Italian bread crumbs, and Andrew had Blackened Chicken, which is a seasoned, grilled chicken breast topped with pico de gallo and avocado. We also had their clam chowder and beef minestrone. The portions were huge and everything was delicious! I think the only mediocre item was the clam chowder.
For ice cream at Revival, I had the Bee’s Knees, which uses locally sourced Monterey honey and beeswax. This was so freaking good! Would definitely come back to Monterey just for this. Andrew got the Passionfruit Mango which was also really good.
The next day, we got some coffee and desserts from Alta Bakery. For the coffee, we ordered their mocha and lavender latte. For desserts, we tried the banana hazelnut tart and carrot cake cookie. Since we started the day with desserts, we figured we’d get some crepes from Crepes of Brittany and had the smoked salmon, brie, and egg crepe and the ham, cheese, and egg crepe. Later on that day, we had amazing clam chowder from The Fish Hopper after we explored the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We had so much food that we actually had our leftovers from Rosine’s and Crepes of Brittany for dinner. On our last day, we had coffee and pastries from Tidal Coffee. Their strawberry matcha croissant was especially amazing!
Monterey Bay Aquarium
I had only been at the Monterey Bay Aquarium once before, and I didn’t remember much of it, so I was really excited to visit again. I was only really here for one thing: sea otters. I was so distracted by the cute sea otters that I actually did not get photos of them, haha. But, it was also just hard to take photos of them because they were swimming fast, and I didn’t want to accidentally elbow the pack of children around me. I was also almost crying out of happiness and sheer cuteness of these otters.
Other activities
Besides the aquarium, of course we explored the Fisherman’s Wharf and Cannery Row. It was nice and relaxing to just walk around and sightsee. We even got to squeeze in two escape room games from Escape Room 831! Overall, it was a really fun weekend.
