A Weekend of Firsts: Vegan Sushi & Standup Paddleboarding!

Hey, hey!

You know that feeling of satisfaction you feel after an awesome weekend? That’s definitely what I’m experiencing on this Monday, as my weekend was an adventure filled few days that has left me smiling! In contrast to the San Diego area being rained out two weekends ago, last weekend was full of sunshine, and we took full advantage of the beautiful weather.

Before I get started with sharing it with you, I want to announce that I’ll be sending out my monthly newsletter this week! The newsletter is full of healthy living tidbits, recipes, workouts, and health coaching exclusives. If you aren’t on my subscriber list yet, you can sign up here:

Any who, on Saturday afternoon, my hubby, pup, and I went for a nice long walk in Carlsbad. We often walk along the coast there, but we tried walking around a new pretty area called the Agua Hedionda Lagoon.

I love exploring new trails, even if they’re flat, and especially when they’re on the coast. I have a bunch of different routes that I do with Harley because I like to switch up our scenery and keep it interesting, and I think that this walk will now be added into the rotation!

Later in the day we decided to act like little kids and have some underwater fun with our GoPro camera. We got one as a gift for Christmas last year, and while we’ve brought it on hikes and mountain biking excursions, we haven’t used it as much as we should. My hubby was videoing himself cannonballing into our pool, and I was trying to capture underwater yoga shots (it’s harder than it looks!).

The above photo cracks me up! We had fun being goofballs.

Since A’s birthday is in a few days, Saturday night I planned a pre-birthday dinner for him. Since he loves sushi, which is not my thing at all, I took him to the Wrench and Rodent Sebasstropub – a small restaurant in Oceanside that I had heard has great sushi.

While I’ve gone to sushi joints with him and ordered soup and salad, this was my first time ever trying plant-based sushi. I ordered an avocado roll and tofu nigiri, along with a mixed green salad. My verdict?

I really can’t hate on fresh veggies with a sesame dressing, so the salad got a thumbs up from me, but I wasn’t crazy about the avocado roll. The reason I didn’t love it was that it was….fishy. I just don’t think I like the taste of seaweed!

On the other hand, I did like the tofu nigiri, which was basically pieces of crispy tofu with sesame and soy sauce wrapped with rice. The tofu was super crispy – which is how I always attempt to make tofu at home, which doesn’t often work out – and the dish had a nice flavor to it.

My hubby had a spicy tuna roll and a house roll with crab, spicy tuna and avocado. He liked both of them, and that was the most important thing to me. Overall I wasn’t overly impressed with vegan sushi, and I think that I’ll stick to udon noodle soup and salad when A is having a sushi craving, but I certainly didn’t mind giving it a try. 

Afterwards, we walked over to the beach to watch the sunset, which was gorgeous as you can see!

I love the gatherings of people that always come to watch the sunsets around here. It’s like a fest full of cute puppies and happy people enjoying their weekend. When the last bit of orange sun set, people started clapping, and A made me laugh because he promptly said, “Don’t worry people, there will be another one of those tomorrow.” He’s forever a sarcastic one! 🙂

Sunday brought the most adventurous part of the weekend (and more GoPro action!): my first time trying standup paddleboarding! My hubby surprised me by booking us board rentals in La Jolla for the afternoon. I had been wanting to try paddleboarding for awhile, and La Jolla is one beautiful place to do it.

While I’ll try any water sport once, I’m not a huge ocean swimmer, so paddleboarding was definitely stepping outside of my comfort zone. When we got to the board shop, we were informed that the water was really choppy for the area that day. Apparently a group of newbie paddleboarders had rented equipment earlier that day, and weren’t able to get past the breaks and into the ocean. They spent 2 hours attempting to get out with their boards and then gave up.

As if this information wasn’t disheartening enough, one of the guys there told us that in the 8 years that the shop has been open, Sunday was in the top 10 roughest days that they’d seen. I cringed a little and thought greeeeattt. But, then and there my hubby and I made it our mission to get out there and succeed in paddleboarding! I love having a partner in life whose just as adventurous as I am.

Being that my hubby goes surfing all the time and I barely step foot in the Pacific Ocean (and because he’s an awesome husband!), we came up with a game plan for him to get my board out there while I swam out to meet him, then he’d go back in and get his own board. I think I could have managed to do it myself, but I would have been pretty damn nervous to do so. Those boards are big! In all honesty, I was even a little nervous swimming out into the water on my own… but long story short, we made it!

Once we got out further, I got more comfortable on the board. I did some paddleboarding standing up, but it was kind of hard to learn since the water was choppy, so I mostly paddleboarded on my knees. Next time I might try to do it at a lake or somewhere calm to get a better hang of it, but it was definitely a challenging workout! It was also so relaxing and calm hanging out far out in the water.

The water temperature was actually pretty warm for the Pacific, so after we returned our boards, we decided to do some swimming and bring our scuba diving gear out. While we saw dolphins for a few moments while out on the paddleboards, we didn’t see too much wildlife scuba diving since the water was so rough, but we had fun goofing off more with the GoPro. Some evidence of this:  

Afterwards, we were hungry, so we refueled with some yummy Mexican burritos:

We both agreed that it was a fabulous, memorable day! I absolutely love trying exciting new things, and I’m certain that I’ll go standup paddleboarding again sometime.

Tell me… What was the last food/fitness ‘first’ for you?