Our Weekend Trip

This past weekend we headed down to Southern California for a fun and family-packed weekend. We left Friday at 6am, and headed over the mountains for SeaTac. Since we were traveling for just the weekend we decided to pack as lightly as possible... and fit all our needs into two adult-sized backbacks, and two child-sized backpacks, each of us carrying our own. The girls did awesome... it was incredibly liberating to travel so lightly... without having to load tons of junk and trip over suitcases, and worry about forgetting endless amounts of "necessary stuff". This is when our experience packing for bare-bones weekend camping trips all summer came in handy.

The purpose of our visit was mostly to visit Gramma... Take lots of pictures and videos...

Give lots of hugs,

And of course, have fun with everyone. :-)

Monday morning we got to visit Sunset Cliffs in San Diego, and the girls got to take a little swim/splash in the ocean... which was Kiki's one burning desire for the whole weekend.

They were quite happy about it all... which helped make up for Frank's unspoken gloominess and general disgust at the whole concept of the beach and sand. He's my very own mountain man. :-)

The beach we were at had a short little shallow area, and then a drop off... Kiki went running in, and promptly dissappeared into the water. It was hilarious. She came up spluttering and clambered onto the shore... with a grin on her face, albiet grumbling about the salt water--which is somehow much worse than the chlorine she swims in here. Later on when we were telling the story to Gramma, and laughing about it, she announced, "It's not funny! My mouth was presented with salt water!!!"

On the plane ride home Kiki sat by me. She entertained herself by making her own bowling alley on the plane tray with a little playdoh pack from one of their kid's meals of the weekend. Rather smart and cute I thought. :-)

After an hour long plane delay, we landed in Seattle at midnight for a fun ride over a few mountain passes with a pleasant mix of torrential downpours and slick and shiney road surfaces. I would like it duly noted that between the city of Cle Elum and home (about 70 miles) I saw (and yes, I counted) only 8 moving cars. Granted, that is between the hours of 2 and 3:30 am, but still. That, my friends, is the life, and so very good for my soul. The sheer volume of people down there makes me twitchy, gives me tension headaches like no other, and makes me quite frankly, feel VERY VERY VERY violent. Hat's off to those who live with that on a daily basis, I couldn't handle it.

And, now we are home-sweet-home, and headed for more family fun with Turkey Day up ahead. The girls have decided it is their favorite holiday, so we are all excited. Kiki has been dancing around the house all morning singing, "Home home home! I love to be COLD, I hate to be HOT! Home home home!" and cheers of glee and hollers of hello erupted when I opened our curtains this morning, and they saw "our" mountain behind our house. And, most of all, we have one very happy doggy, who has been blissfully licking the girls all morning long, and allowing them to torture her... she's sitting so close to us all, she might very well actually be behind us. :-)

To the SoCal Uncles&Aunts, thanks so much for housing us, and showing us such a good time while we were down there... we all had such fun! Can't wait to return the favor. :-)