We took a little excursion down to sunny Northern California for a family reunion.
Along the way we stopped in Medford, Oregon and had fun on the bumper boats and go karts, as well as an ice cream treat afterwards at Dairy Queen.

 

 

Then it was time to finish the last leg of the journey to Santa Rosa, but we stopped in for a tour of the Jelly Belly factory first. At the end we got little packets of jelly beans. One packet was Tabasco flavor jelly beans. Elsa really wanted to try them. She was fine for the first couple of seconds and then decided they were definitely not for her.

Friday morning it was off to get some sun hats, and then kite flying and sand castle building with Ben and Stacey. Myles got to fly his T-Rex kite. Chris finally go his kite up and flying for all of 10 minutes before it was time to head out, and  we almost lost Aeva's new flip flops in the surf. Luckily the waves helped to bring them up enough for me to run out and grab them. Poor Elsa was so scared that I was going to swept out to see while rescuing the flip flops. Ben and Stacey were schooling each other in proper sandcastle building. Afterwards we met up with Cullen and Clay (and Company) at Mary's Pizza. Lots of fun to sit and visit with them while eating some yummy pizza!

 

  That evening we had some family photos taken. Myles and Cash, and Elsa and Tuppence became fast friends. Elsa wanted to know if we could keep Tuppence. After pictures we went to visit Christopher's mom. Myles very much enjoyed doing a majority of the talking while we visited with Grandma Jean. He and Elsa loved petting Misha.

Saturday, after visiting at my parents house for a bit, we went to the family reunion which was so much fun but not long enough. I got some wonderful pictures of Elsa and Meg with Papa and pictures of Meg with three of her Great Aunties.

 

After the reunion we headed over to the Oakland Temple. The sun was out and it was absolutely gorgeous. It was so nice to walk around the grounds, and it brought back memories of our wedding day almost 20 years ago.

Sunday morning came too soon. We did our best to do what we wanted to while we were down in California, but as always time went too fast.
Here is Meg on our fist leg of the long drive Sunday................all smiles. We were all glad to crawl into our beds at 10:00 that night.
All in all it was a very fun, fabulous, and memorable trip!