Friday, September 6, 2013

Glamping: Day Three

We woke up without any real plans for the day. Because we didn’t bring that much food and we were planning on eating many of our meals out, we knew we better start figuring out where we wanted to go for lunch so that we could plan the rest of our day around that. Yes, my life is organized around food…sad, but true. We all agreed on Indian food, and Heather, being the queen of Yelp, found a restaurant in Windsor.

It turns out the restaurant we planned on going to really wasn’t Indian, which we should’ve been able to figure out by its name, “Himalayan Restaurant”. Thankfully Himalayan and Indian cuisines overlap one another quite a bit. We decided to share several appetizers and entrees. Their menu was nice because they labeled which items were vegan, facilitating the ordering process. We ended up ordering vegetable samosa, vegetable pakora, and dal (lentil soup) for starters. I’m not a big fan of samosa, but for a dish I don’t normally like, it was really good. Pakora on the other hand is my all time favorite Indian/Himalayan food. Their pakora was excellent, awesome crispiness and flavor! The dal was also really good; together we demolished all of the appetizers. For lunch we collectively ordered: chana saag, tofu saag vegan, aloo cauli vegan, and garlic naan. Even though naan isn’t vegan, I have a really hard time passing it up. I enjoyed everything we ordered, especially the chana saag. The service was also superb!  

 Vegetable Samosa

Vegetable Pakora

Dal

Chana Saag

After lunch we walked around downtown Windsor. We stopped at Powell’s Sweet Shoppe where they sell every candy imaginable. To my surprise, I escaped with only a bag of sour jelly beans. Lauren was really looking forward to visiting a yarn store on our glamping trip. Oddly, we couldn’t find any yarn shops in Windsor. Luckily though, we found a few on Yelp in Santa Rosa. So off to Santa Rosa we went!



We were planning on going to Cast Away to look at yarn, but once we arrived we discovered a carnival was taking place and we would have to pay the carnival entry fare just to look at the store… at $10 a person with no desire to participate in carnival activities, no thanks. Back on our phones we went in search of other yarn stores in Santa Rosa. We found several, but after calling the shops to verify their hours of business, we learned that they had either gone out of business or they weren’t open on Sundays. Double fail! After more searching we located a yarn shop in Sebastopol. Even though we spent the entire previous day in Sebastopol, we decided to go back…the things we do for yarn.

It took us 20 minutes to get to Balls & Skeins, but it was well worth the numerous phone calls, Yelp/Google searches, and miles of driving. The owner was very nice and helpful. Lauren bought two skeins of MadTosh, and I bought a skein of Nichole yarn in the “Janice Joplin” colorway. I wanted to get something unique to Sebastopol or at Least Sonoma County. I couldn’t find anything made locally, but I’d never seen Nichole yarn before, so to me it was still unique, and I love the colors and weight of the yarn!

After driving around Windsor, Santa Rosa, and Sebastopol all day we were exhausted, but it was our last night before having to go back home, so we didn’t want to waste it by napping. Once we got back to the campsite we started a campfire. We used the remainder of the Duraflame logs the previous night, so we had to start a fire and keep it burning using only matches. It took a few tries and a lot of matches, but we did it! I found it worked best to gather a bunch of small twigs and make a nest of them in the center of the fire pit. Using several matches, we lit various areas of the twig nest until the majority of it caught flame. Slowly, we added larger logs, making sure not to accidently put the fire out. It was a very proud moment for all of us :)

Even though we weren’t able to find vegan marshmallows, a glamping trip would not be complete without s’mores. Because Marissa isn’t vegetarian/vegan, she still roasted regular marshmallows. Despite the lack of vegan marshmallows, we made vegan s’mores with graham crackers and rice chocolate. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to partake in any roasting activities, but I still had a blast eating my chocolate! For dinner, we polished off the rest of the bean and rice burritos and grilled the leftover pizza from the previous day’s lunch. (The pizza was much better grilled.)

Day four of glamping coming up…     

No comments:

Post a Comment