Time to hit the road this week, as the Get Your Phil staff goes on a mini-vacation. But don't fret: I remembered to take a lot of pictures. Strap yourselves in, it's time for my vacation slides.

My wife and I hit a milestone anniversary last year, and to celebrate, we booked a three-day getaway to one of our favorite places in the world — the Mendocino County coast. It's about three hours from where we live, give or take a traffic snag along the way, but it's a very different part of California, with wind-swept bluffs overlooking the Pacific and the kind of trees and landscapes you don't see a lot of in the Bay Area. The plan was to spend a few days hiking, eating at some of our favorite restaurants, and marveling at the fact that we still enjoy each other's company after a quarter-century on the books.

And two days before we were supposed to leave, I broke my arm.

I remember lying there on the sidewalk, checking to see if I still had all my teeth after face-planting on the ground, fumbling for my phone to stop the podcast that was still playing on as if nothing had happened, and then realizing that my attempt to move my left arm was making bones shift around in a way that they really shouldn't. And the first thought in my head was, "Man, this is really going to fuck up my vacation plans."

And indeed it did, though not as much as I initially feared. The nice couple who run the Mar Vista cottages on the Mendocino coast were kind enough to let us postpone our stay, shifting the three days we had booked to some point in the future once my bones had a chance to heal. 

And that opportunity proved to be last week, so up to Mendocino we went. Not without some drama first, of course, since that's been par for the course for me over the last six months or so. 

I took our Subaru in for service, a prudent move before a 127-mile drive that included a long stretch on a winding, coastal highway, and learned that the car needed some substantial maintenance — so much so that I was going to have to leave it in the shop for a while. Fortunately, the dealership supplied us with some loaner wheels, or I was going to come to the conclusion that someone really didn't want me and my wife to ever make it to Mendocino.

Yet, reach it we did, and it proved to be a very restful, relaxing time of staring out into the sea. 

I'm not being sarcastic here — there is something to be said for removing yourself from the hustle of daily living, silencing the electronics, and drinking in your surroundings. In my case, that's the Pacific Ocean crashing into the rocks beneath a sea cliff in Fort Bragg, but for you, it could be some other kind of calming landscape. Whether it's for three days or 15 minutes, it really helps rewire the brain.

Which is not to say my entire time in Mendocino was spent looking oceanward. I'm not the speediest reader in the world, but I just about wrapped up Alan Siegel's Stupid TV, Be More Funny over the course of my stay, and that's a couple hundred pages diving deep into what makes The Simpsons a landmark TV show. We also visited a couple of Mendocino County landmarks, one familiar and one that's new to us.

The familiar one is the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens in Fort Bragg, which gives you 47 acres of gardens, cultivated and otherwise, to wander through. And if the rhododendron and dahlias eventually prove to be too repetitive to your taste, the garden leads to a coastal trail for more up-close-and-personal time with the Pacific.

Our new stop was the Point Arena Lighthouse, which at a height of 115 feet, is tied for the tallest lighthouse on the west coast with Pigeon Point Lighthouse, 189 miles to the south in Pescadero. Did I climb to the top of the lighthouse? I certainly did. Did my heart and legs lodge serious objections two-thirds of the way up? Again, yes.

The lighthouse needs to be on the taller side because the actual coastline near Point Arena is something you're going to want to avoid if you're piloting any type of sea vessel. Just to the north of the lighthouse, you'll see a burst of foam occasionally spray out of the ocean's surface, which you might mistake for a whale or some other sea creature popping up from the water. It is not — instead, that's the only hint of what's lurking beneath the water: a reef the size of a football field that's it's claimed a fair number of ships over the years, with the last wreck of note taking place in the 1940s. There's a reason why this section of far northern California is known as the Lost Coast — good luck trying to approach its shoreline.

I'm at a point right now where it's easy to block out time to recharge and rethink a few things, what on account of not having a steady job. But even when a regular gig resumes, I need to remember to carve out moments where I reboot the ol' brain — and it's something I recommend you do, too.

The Mar Vista cottages where we stayed during this getaway include Chicken City, home to about 200 chickens that freely roam the grounds when there are no guests with large dogs to terrify the poultry. All those chickens produce a lot of eggs, and Mar Vista guests are treated to a basket of eggs left on the porch of their cottage each night. As such, I whipped up all of our breakfasts in-house. I wound up cooking dinner on site, too.

But that left lunches, which is where we took the opportunity to explore the eateries of the Mendocino (and Sonoma) coastline. I'm pleased to report we found two winners.

Sea Pal Cove, located on the Noyo Harbor of Fort Bragg, isn't a new find — in fact, we make it a point to eat there any time we find ourselves on the Mendocino coast. Sea Pal specializes in deep-fried everything, with the fish-and-chips a particular standout. The batter stays crispy, and the fish isn't the least bit greasy. I enjoyed a cheeseburger this time around, and I've also liked the clam chowder in the past. Basically, anything on the Sea Pal menu is a hit, and that includes the deep-fried candy bars. (Though my wife's recommendation is to order those after you've eaten your main meal, as the candy bar tends to disintegrate within its batter-y coating if you let it stand around for too long.)

Cafe Aquatica in Jenner was the new find on this outing. It's located at the mouth of the Russian River, and while I assume that coffee and baked goods are the specialty of the house, you'll find some pretty good sandwiches on the menu. I certainly enjoyed my portobello sandwich, the mushroom served with some tomato and greens on toasted focaccia. Usually, that's not my favorite bread, but it's nicely toasted here, and the pesto aioli adds a pleasant basil note to the proceedings.

That leaves the Gualala Seafood Shack as our other lunchtime spot, and while I wouldn't pan the place, I wouldn't go out of my way to eat there again. I had the rockfish burrito, and the grilled fish was certainly moist and tasty. But I was a bit put off by the fact that they use white rice in the burrito, since I forgot that in some parts of far northern California, spice is viewed with suspicion. The coating on the fried calamari also came off too easily, though my wife speaks highly of the quality of the French fries.

To the extent that I watch reality television, it tends to feature competitions of some sort as opposed to programs where the producers train some cameras on a bunch of unremarkable idiots with poor impulse control to see who starts punching whom. Or kissing whom. Or both. At least with competitions, there is some degree of skill involved.

Even with this criterion, I'm likely to dip in and out of shows after a while once the contestants clock the rules and figure out a way to game the competition. That pretty much happened with The Amazing Race, which was a fun hang while it lasted, and while I enjoyed the last season of the U.S. version of The Traitors, I suspect the producers got lucky with the casting.

My love for Top Chef hasn't wavered, though, as I've been watching that show for more than a decade. I think what sets Top Chef apart — other than my interest in food, of course — is that the show features talented professionals who compete against each other with an air of collegiality. I guess you run into villain edits every now and again, but you don't get the sense that the producers are putting their thumb on the scale to highlight this season's Bad Boy/Girl. Instead, the show does what it says on the label — try and find someone who's really good at cooking things, with a minimum of deceptive editing tricks and cliffhangers.

Which is not to say that Top Chef's occasional format tweaks don't always pay off. As you may or may not know, there's a component to the show called Last Chance Kitchen where eliminated contestants get a chance to cook their way back into the show. It started out as a way for Bravo to try and goose its website, but it's become a nice bite-sized version of Top Chef to be enjoyed outside the show proper.

This current season, however, there's a twist. The first two eliminated chefs will not get a chance to compete on Last Chance Kitchen — once they're gone, it's not au revoir, it's goodbye. I suppose the format change raises the stakes for the early rounds a bit, but due to a quirk in this year's competition, something profoundly unfair happened. 

Top Chef Spoilers to follow if you're stockpiling episodes to watch at your leisure. 

There's a contestant on this season named Nana, who is most certainly a very strong cook, since you do not wind up on Top Chef at this point in the show’s run without possessing some serious chops. But based on the evidence so far, she is very ill-suited to appearing on a competitive cooking show, since she struggles with time management. In Week 1, she failed to get all the elements on the plate for the elimination competition. She followed that up in Week 3 by plating even less food. 

Normally, not getting food on the plate gets you a one-way ticket home, but Nana lucked out in that someone in Week 1 undercooked their protein, and that's a capital offense in Tom Colicchio's eyes. Likewise, in Week 2, the judges decided that another contestant's dish was worse than Nana's. Neither of those eliminated chefs will get a shot at Last Chance Kitchen, though, while Nana — finally eliminated in Week 3 — will.

But c'mon — while those other dishes may have been subpar, at least they were finished in the allotted time. When you fail to complete your cooking in two out of the three weeks you stick around on the show, I'm not sure why you're getting another opportunity. You're taking a space away from someone who, at the very least, fulfilled the minimum requirements of the brief — serve us food. So I don't care for that turn of events at all.

Small potatoes? Most definitely. But it's my newsletter and these are my petty gripes.

While I was busy galavanting around the coast, other people were writing articles well worth your time.

I'm fascinated by the filmography of director Richard Linklater, who cranks out a bunch of movies on a regular basis that cover a wild variety of interests. In recent times, he's done everything from a movie set in the midst of the French New Wave Cinema movement to a rom-com featuring a college professor who moonlights as a pretend hitman for local undercover operations. It's quite the eclectic mix.

I took in another recent effort of Linklater's, Blue Moon, a character study of the lyricist Lorenz Hart on the night when it becomes readily apparent that his partnership with composer Richard Rodgers is over. Seeing your partner of 26 years team up with Oscar Hammerstein to write Oklahoma! will force a fella to rethink his place in the universe.

Not that the Lorenz Hart portrayed in Blue Moon is all that clear-eyed. This is a film that traffics heavily into delusion and the lies we tell ourselves to keep carrying on, which becomes readily apparent whether we're watching Hart convince himself that he and Rodgers will re-team on a musical about Marco Polo, of all things, or that there's a real romance blooming between himself and a much younger student.

Blue Moon is a showcase for Ethan Hawke, and it's worth watching the movie just for that. Hawke disappears into the role, and it's a very poignant performance — one that makes you feel pity for Hart even for problems that are of his own making.

The script has a few too many moments where viewers are meant to elbow each other knowingly — no, Lorenz Hart did not give E.B. White the idea for Stuart Little, nor did a passing remark Hart makes to Hammerstein incept itself into the mind of a young Stephen Sondheim who's there to overhear the conversation. That stuff's a little too on the nose. But just sit back and enjoy Hawke's performance, and you'll find Blue Moon a worthwhile watch.

And that's the Phil for this week — thanks for reading. Don't change a hair for me; not if you care for me.