6/18/2011

Today’s Sponsor: Islands Restaurant

Start: Gilroy, CA
End: Santa Clarita, CA
Miles Driven: 280

And we’re off! Summer Vacation 2011 is officially underway. We left Gilroy around noon and didn’t get too far before we stopped to eat – we made it about 10 miles and stopped at Casa de Fruta for lunch.

After lunch, we continued on down I-5 toward Southern California. Turns out there’s a lot of construction going on down around Taft, and I-5 is necked down into one lane with crazy delays, so we jumped onto Highway 46, then got onto Highway 99. That wound up costing us about 25 miles but saved a bunch of time from sitting in traffic. Thank you, BlackBerry Traffic, for the traffic alert!

We pulled into the La Quinta Inn in Santa Clarita about 5:30, just in time for dinner. Turns out one of our favorite restaurants was just up the road, so we headed to the Valencia Mall and nommed at Islands Restaurant.

The food, as always, was totally great. Awesome burgers and we all got our favorite treats – I had a frozen cola lime ice, and Gillian got a virgin Mai Tai (I have no idea where she picked that up, honest!)

Since we were at the mall, and it was still pretty early, we decided to catch the new Green Lantern flick. After wandering the mall for about a half hour on foot, we finally figured out that the movie theater was off-premise, so walked the couple blocks to the movie. That turned out to be a pretty good thing, as we all could have used the exercise from the crazy huge burgers that Islands makes. :)

The movie wasn’t too horrible, all things considered. It took a couple liberties from the Green Lantern comic I remember as a kid, but they were reasonable and didn’t make me go WTF through the whole movie. Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively were fun to watch as Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris, and the supporting cast did a good job holding the rest of the film together. It’s not a life changing movie, but it’s worth some time on a Friday night.

Next up, we continue on to San Diego. More to come….