Michael and Katie had a track meet on Saturday the 3rd so we couldn't leave too early. We got going and made it to Wendover for the boys to attend the Priesthood session of General Conference. David is now 12 and old enough to go.
While the boys were in the church, the girls colored Easter eggs. Things have been a little crazy overbooked lately and this almost didn't happen. Can you believe I let them do this in the motorhome? I almost can't.
Here we are Easter morning. The Easter bunny found us all the way in Winnemucka, Nevada. What an amazing bunny. We brought our internet thing (real technical jargon!) so we could listen to General Conference on the road to California.
We reached the bay area Sunday late afternoon and went to see the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier turned museum. Here are the kids in the pilot house being captain.
It was pouring when we got there and were glad most of the tour was inside. The flight deck wasn't, obviously, but we braved the elements and got a behind the scenes tour of areas roped off from a bored docent. Cool.
Luckily the weather was fine the next day. We got passes for the cable cars and rode to our heart's content.
Hang on!!
We hopped off the cable car and walked down the crookedest street, Lombard.
Next, we walked to the other cable car line and took it back to Chinatown.
If you haven't been to the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory it's worth the stop. There are three women sitting at these rotating griddles, cooking the cookies and then they fold fortunes into the cookies. Pretty cool.
This is it. The whole place. wow.
On to Dim Sum. Yum.
I went to high school for two years in San Francisco and dim sum is one of my fondest memories. I couldn't wait to have a steamed pork bun. The rest was good, too.
Love the hat!
We went to get tickets to visit Alcatraz and it was sold out for both days we were there so this is as close as we got. Luckily, we visited Alcatraz a couple of years ago and so we didn't have to be totally disappointed because we have seen it before.
On our last visit, we missed this, however. The line was horrific and we didn't have the time to wait. Our trip this time was very relaxed and we had time to sit and enjoy the better things in life.
How is it that food is such a big part of our life?
Next we went to the Exploratorium. It is a hands on science museum with over 400 exibits to play with. We were there for three hours and saw most of it.
Whoa, a lot of us.
uh, Katie, you might want to move.
Who is this? Can you tell? This was a kind of divided two way mirror. You and someone else sat on opposite sides of the mirror and it showed you alternating slices of your face and theirs. It was weird when you moved up and down and then you were looking in their eyes, your nose, etc.
Thirsty anyone?
That night, we went to see Wicked. It was great, of course.
On the way back to the motorhome on BART, David was hanging from the bar, swinging with the motion of the car. He was trying to hang on from stop to stop, people were smiling, chuckling and then even cheering him on. How is it at 11:30 PM anyone has the strength or energy to do such a thing?
The next day, we started our drive down the coast. We stopped and went to the beach. I'm not sure where we were, Carmel, Monterey, somewhere. It was windy and therefore chilly but the kids had to get in.
Somehow I got two of these in here, oops.
It was a gorgeous beach!
My pictures are out of order but oh well. We decided to drive on Highway 1, not knowing that it was HOURS long and there was no way to get off the road and back to normal roads without just suffering through the fright. Of course we were on the ocean side of the skinny, winding narrow road in a huge monstrosity of a motorhome with 700 ft cliffs just inches to the right. We did stop several times to look over the edge and to breathe easy for a few minutes. I let Nelson drive and had to go to the back and stop watching for a while since no one had brought any Valium. Just kidding, maybe the ride was just fine for everyone else. In spite of the treacherous nature of the drive, it was spectacular scenery.
Here we are at the Carmel mission.
More driving pics.
Any guesses?
We stopped along the road to see a beach that was covered with elephant seals. They are pretty funny to watch. They push, shove, "yell" at each other and then drop to napping immediately I guess from exhaustion, laziness, who knows.
Next we went to Solvang. Here is their reproduction of the Little Mermaid statue in Denmark. This is a Danish settlement and the pastries were awesome.
Next we stopped in Santa Barbara. The kids found a big pipe running out into the water and climbed really far out onto it.
The little blips on the right are them on the pipe.
Caroline loves to make sand creations.
Our last stop in California was the Ronald Reagan Library. This is the real Air Force One he used when in office. This is a pretty impressive presidential library, I'd recommend it. I wish I could say that we went to Paris to visit Jordan, but no. This is Paris, Las Vegas style. We stopped for crepes and kept going.
When we got to St. George we stopped at Green Valley and went for a swim. It was so warm on our vacation, I can't wait for it to be warm here!
We had a great time!
By the way, I have a couple of other posts I just did to catch up that aren't showing when you scroll down, so click on older posts to see those, too! I guess that happens when you have an epic post about Spring Break!
