California Trip Part 2

Alright-Part Two!


There are so many Indian restaurants in Mountain View! This delighted Jeff Beatty, but I wasn't feeling it as much. Mainly because of the wicked heartburn it tends to bring me at inopportune times (AKA bedtime). So we avoided Indian food as long as we could, but I eventually caved, assuming that I had enough medicine to cover me in case of out of control heartburn (that didn't work like I thought it would, but oh well).
So we chose a place right down the road from Jeff's office and it was pretty good!

My food was pretty darn spicy, but the garlic naan was fantastic, so that made it okay. :)


After I took Jeff back to work, I tried to find things to keep myself occupied. The biggest adventure I had that day was my outing to the historic Renstrorff House in Shoreline Park in Mountain View. I did some internet-based research and discovered that the park has a kite-flying area, which I thought might be a fun way to pass the time. More research led me to a couple of toy stores in the area where I could purchase a kite for my high-flying adventure in the park. So, with the map in my head and car keys in hand, I set out to find a kite and have myself some fun! Turns out, toy store wasn't where the map said it would be, so I never found it. I did, however, find this little gem...

Yup! I found Easy Street. I thought it was purely metaphorical, but apparently that's not always the case! Pretty sweet, right? ....It might be cooler to me than anyone else, but it's pretty darn cool to me, so that's all that matters. :)


After coming up empty after the failed toy store outing, I thought to myself "they've gotta sell kites at Walgreen's, right?" So I went to Walgreen's, looked around for what seemed like 30 minutes (how long it actually was I will never know), then finally gave up and bought some Easter candy for Jeff and my Dad. As I'm leaving the store I see the kites. Boxes and boxes of kites that I didn't see on the way in, but spent a while looking for. I was a little bugged that I didn't see them before, but bought one anyway.


After assembling my kite (and stopping at the hotel to eat something), I left for the park. I decided that I wanted to stop in at the Renstrorff House to see if it was some sort of reception area for the park, but it turned out to be the historic home of Henry Renstrorff, Mountain View's oldest resident. He build the house in 18...57? Something like that. Later on, the house fell into disrepair and was bought by the city of Mountain View for $1, transplanted from its original location to a site nearer the water and inside the park, and renovated to mostly resemble its original look (renovations cost $1 million).

These are picture rails! Built into the wall to hold up pictures-what a great idea, right?

It's beautiful, right? The biggest bummer for me, though, was that nothing on the inside was original to the house. The old, framed black and white picture was taken of the outside of the house after it had been abandoned and completely trashed. So the outside looks amazing by comparison, but everything on the inside is a reproduction. Kind of a bummer, right? It was  more than I was expecting though, so that was a pleasant surprise. My sweet, Russian tour guide was also pregnant, so that was pretty cool to talk with her about. 

After I left the Renstrorff House, I headed over to the kite area. By this time, the wind had picked up quite a bit, and it was pretty intense. There were several other people flying legit-looking kites, but were fighting to keep them in the air. It's a bit tough to see in the pictures I took, but this one kite had a horizontal grip with two thick strings on either side connecting it with the kite, with the girl trying to reign it in struggling immensely.

Then there was this other guy trying to keep his parachute-looking kite in the air, but having a hard time:

So I observed the current conditions, then took a look at my kite....

...yeah, there was no way that was happening. I felt foolish just thinking about trying to fly this kite! So I watched the kite-flying for a bit, took some pictures, but then went back to the hotel, ate and laid down for a while.

The only really noteworthy thing we did later is hit up this cupcake cafe called Sprinkles. It got good reviews on yelp, but I doubted very much that it would even come close to competing with the Cocoa Bean. Turns out I was right, but the cupcake was still cute and pretty good. It's just that nothing compares to Cocoa Bean!

And the wooden fork, while super beautiful, is terrible to actually eat off of. Luckily, we bought paper plates and plastic utensils at the beginning of the week, so I had a plastic fork to eat my cupcake with. The cake was moist, but the frosting was unimpressive and kinda lame. I make better cupcakes than Sprinkles does. For real. I make delicious cupcakes. I'll post my recipe sometime.

That's all for Part 2! On to Part 3!