Food fit for a Queen

Jerry and I took a little vacation this week. We started the week by doing San Diego activities then headed north for a few days.

Here's what I ate on the road.

Our first stop was Laguna Beach where they have art galleries. We didn't buy anything except lunch. We ate at the Heidelberg Pastry Bistro.

I had the Spicy Heidelberg Wrap and iced tea. It wasn't terribly spicy. It was good.
This was across the street from the Pottery Shack that isn't there anymore. It's now The Old Pottery Place where they have a cafe, an art gallery, tchotchke shops, etc. I'll miss the Pottery Shack.

We then shopped for a while in the downtown part of Laguna Beach for a few hours then headed to our hotel in Long Beach.

Jerry comes up with fun vacations. We stayed on the Queen Mary for a couple of nights. For dinner the first night we ate in the Promenade Café.

I had fettuccine with vegetables. (I forgot to take the picture until I had eaten quite a bit of it. Sorry.)

The next morning we had breakfast in their coffee shop. We had bagels with cream cheese and caffè americano. (Again, I forgot to take the picture until after I had started eating. There's a bite missing from the bottom half.)

We then took the Catalina Express to Avalon on Santa Catalina Island. I don't know if the hotel upgraded us to the Commodore Lounge on the way to the island or if it was part of the package Jerry booked. (We were planning on taking the boat from the Queen Mary but that service gets turned off after Labor Day so we had to go to the downtown port. Maybe they upgraded us for our inconvenience.) Because we were in the Commodore Lounge, we got a cookie and a beverage.

Here's my chocolate chip cookie with the usual missing bite because I forgot to take my picture in time.

And my mimosa.

There's not much to do in Avalon. There are tourist junk shops. And restaurants. (There are tours around the island but that's another story.) We had lunch at a café on the water.

I had a mushroom veggie burger and fries. I forgot about taking a picture until I was finished. It's just as well, it wasn't terribly good. The mushrooms had no flavor and the burger was pretty flavorless, too, in spite of all the flavorful ingredients the menu said it contained. Don't bother with the Busy Bee Café when you visit Avalon. Jerry wasn't thrilled with his lunch, either.

Veggie burger and fries aftermath:

(As you can see I finished it anyway.)

Our return trip wasn't until 7:30 so we had dinner in Avalon. It was much better than lunch. Jerry enjoyed the aroma of the smoker cooking food at El Galleon and they had pasta primavera for the picky eater so that's where we ate.

My pasta primavera before even one bite was taken!
(We didn't keep what they called "souvenir glasses.")

We sat on the outside deck of the boat on our return to Long Beach. There was a beautiful sunset.

We had some shopping to do in Santa Monica so that's where we headed Friday morning. We got on the freeway and decided to stay in the carpool lane and held out till we got to the Santa Monica area for breakfast. We had bagels with cream cheese and americanos at Tanner's Coffee.
My Linux netbook wouldn't connect to their free WiFi service so I didn't get to check my email for the whole trip.

We were very successful in our shopping on Montana Avenue but you'll have to wait to hear about that adventure.

We then headed downtown to shop at Penzeys Spices. Jerry stocked up on spices. Later, you'll hear about some other fun stores we happened to run into.

We had lunch on the Third Street Promenade. I had a caprese sandwich. Yum.

We finished with our shopping and headed home. We were not ready to do any cooking. So we went off to another fine restaurant.

That's just a taste of our vacation. I'll tell you what we did between meals later.