Vacations are wonderful, but even a very short break away from normal life can feed the soul. This long weekend I had the chance to spend a lot of time with my amazing wife, Meghan, enjoying each other’s company and some beautiful drives. I’m very lucky to have a partner that appreciates the journey as much as the destination.

We celebrated Valentine’s Day with a surprise getaway to Bainbridge Island. Dinner at Hitchcock, an overnight at the Inn at Pleasant Beach, breakfast at the Good Egg and a driving tour around the island…partly because I got lost trying to find the restaurant 🙂

Monday we found ourselves with both kids in camp from 9 to 6 and with the day unbooked. We could have done laundry or other chores that we neglected earlier in the weekend but there will always be more laundry. Instead, we charted a course to great coffee, amazing tacos and a fun twisty road, Chuckanut Drive.

After dropping the kids off at Flying Circus Camp, we fueled up at one of favorite breakfast spots in Seattle, The Wandering Goose. Our next destination was the entry point to Chuckanut Drive, one of the most scenic twisty roads we have in the area. After carving our way up the road, we made it to Bellingham for some coffee and a bio break at The Black Drop Coffeehouse. The coffee was great and it was fun to be surrounded by college students overdosing on caffeine while cramming for an art history exam. Then back down Chuckanut Drive where we had just enough time to walk to the beach at Larrabee State Park and stop at a few scenic overlooks on our way to lunch.

Our lunch spot was really the inspiration for the whole trip. I was looking for a good day drive option in the winter and googled “restaurants worth driving to from Seattle”. Mariposa Taqueria was high on that list and we found out why. Amazing food, fresh made tortillas and a fun vibe made this place the highlight of the trip. After lunch we had to drive fast and get through bad Seattle traffic in time to pick up the kids but this is a day drip we could easily turn into a long weekend of exploring when we have more time.

I joined The Shop for many reasons. I love all things cars, I wanted to meet other car people, I love the beautiful exotics that are stored there and their onsite restaurant, Derby, has some truly kick ass bacon…so many reasons. I’ve also always wanted to do more work on my own cars but have lacked the skills, the tools, the patience and the courage to really jump into it. The Shop has the tools, the lifts, the wash bays all ready for me. Even better, they have professional mechanics available to do complete jobs, assist with DIY jobs and they also offer classes. No more excuses.

I just got back from my first shop class at The Shop and it was so much fun. We swapped out the factory suspension on an older BMW for a new set of Bilstein shocks and H&R springs. This is a project I never would have attempted myself but with the right tools and some help, was really easy.

The process of removing the old shocks/struts was simple enough. The tricky part is getting the assembly apart with the spring under load without losing all your teeth! You can see what happens when you over torque a nut during reassembly.

The slightly more dangerous way to release the tension from the spring!

While I was there, I thought I should share some of the other ongoing projects since my other photos have always been of the exotic cars that are in storage there. This is the more functional side of the shop.

I’m looking forward to the whole series of classes and eventually taking the welding course…then I can really cause some trouble!

Gabe and I were out doing chores and I let him pick where we would have lunch. He wanted to go to Derby, a restaurant that is part of the car club (The Shop) that we belong to. He likes to hang out in the lounge and check out the cool cars and I certainly wasn’t going to argue with him!

After a nice brunch, we had time to walk around and pretend that all of these stunning cars are ours 🙂

The Sport Chrono Package in a 911 comes with a bunch of fun features like sport/sport plus mode, launch control, dynamic engine mounts, etc. It also comes along with the chronometer (aka, the wart) that sits on your dash and is used in conjunction with a stick on steering column as a lap timer. It’s basically just a very accurate stopwatch. Super cool…and I never use it. I’m sure if I did a lot of competitive track driving I would love it for the data logging. I don’t.

Sitting in a Starbucks parking lot, I was playing around with the lap timer and finally found a cool use for it…now it will just display 911 until I reset it 🙂 I am way too proud of myself for getting it to hit this on the mark…those digits fly by! I won’t admit how many times I had to try!