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What's fabulous about LA is that you can wake up in the morning, have your breakfast, and decide to spend yourhard earned day offat the beach... in no time. This past weekend we ventured out to sunny Malibu for our third stair-climb, gaining one step closer to conquering our Mount Whitney feat. Continuing our exercising with tea adventures, our featured tea of choice was Silver Needle white tea, no sweetener, chilled.

Parking on Pacific Coast Highway was polite, possibly because we discovered a way to cheat the parking gods. Since the stair climb is throughout the residential neighborhood of Malibu, we figured to park uphill on a windy street where our climb would weave through, and it worked. We squeezed our car on a tight roundabout where parking was permitted on non "red flag days" (has anyone figured out what that even is?)

Walking by an SUV with an open trunk we see blond haired, sun-kissed kids in swimsuits looking too young to be drinking enjoying the views of the ocean on a beautiful weekend. Down a flight of stairs and crossing the overpass of PCH to the west side we stayed true to the stair count and began our journey with sandy feet.

Charles Fleming,the author of the LA stair climbs andnow our guide, describes a set of lingering, steep stairs along this trail as the "stairwell to nowhere." These nowhere stairs are exactly that, but they add a very nice level of difficulty if you decide to scale them a couple of times during each round of the Castellammare hike like we did. We're not sure if these steps were included in the article's count, we added it to ours anyway. After all, it couldn't hurt to throw in another 66 steps one way to spice up the mix.

Passing through homes which make you want to play that game of "which house would you want," we see evidence of neighborhood unification: handwritten blue signs every few feet warning drivers to "slow down" and "watch out" for "children at play."

We incline up to experience a breathtaking view of the Pacific Ocean dotted with sailboats on the left and a decked out, Italian style mansion called Villa de Leon, once belonging toLeon Kauffman, a wool magnate famous in the1920's lies straight ahead.

Perhaps it was the large, wide and smooth stones with ornate detailing that gave this villa its authentic, transcendent exterior. A sprawling lawn overlooking the ocean makes you stop and stare...one can only imagine the frolicky horseplay at this mansion's 'hay-day'.

Up and around the bend we come back down to PCH for another two rounds. A lookout into the ocean reveals swarms of what appeared to be orangey-brown sea kelp which we couldn't help but think of the view of the oil-ridden Mexican Gulf.

Altogether, we conqueredthe Castellammare's 396steps three times plus the 'Stair's to Nowhere' 132 times three, giving this workout a total of 1584 steps. Silver Needle White Tea was the perfect selection for this journey. Its naturally airy-sweet taste complemented the soft, oceanic breeze upon our skins. The chilled version of the tea felt more replenishing like a Gatorade, but with added immune building strength and no sugar sticking to your teeth and clogging your throat. I'd definitelychoose Silver Needleagain as a workout companion. Not to mention we are both noticing an increased endurance drinking tea with our cardiovascular workouts versus working out without tea.

If you're trying tea with your workouts, comment here and letus know or write us about it. We'd love to hear about it.

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