Life In General: Semi-Sunny Socal Sojourn

San Francisco was beautifully sunny the next morning. We got on the road early and enjoyed a warm, sunny drive through some of the most un-scenic stretches of highway known to man. We made a stop at Casa de Fruta, a huge fruit stand on Hwy 152 on our way over to I5, to pick up some delicious California oranges, strawberries and mangos. We stopped for lunch at a great little roadside oasis (a.k.a. a rest stop in the middle of nowhere), where the boys joyfully ran around the picnic table about 200 times. The portable DVD player was a life-saver on this day of travel. Jeff and I also got to enjoy a book on cd while the boys napped/just sat quietly.

Our goal for the day was to make it to Rancho Bernardo (about 60 miles north of San Diego), where my grandparents live, by 6:00ish. We might have been close to being on time, if we hadn't gotten stuck in traffic because a propane tanker ran off the road. It was the hottest part of the afternoon and we were just 20 or so miles north of Burbank, when all of a sudden 4 lanes of LA traffic had to be funneled down to 1 lane. It was quite ridiculous. And frustrating. We were probably delayed for about 1 hour. By the time we stopped for gas and dinner (in a moment of desperation we decided to stop at McDonald's so that the boys could run around in the playland...we had intended to limit our fast-food stops to In N' Out only), we were behind schedule by almost 3 hours, so we didn't get to my grandparents house until 8:30, and the boys were totally wound-up when we got there. After about an hour of running laps around their living room and visiting we were ready for bed. Luckily the next day we did not plan on traveling at all, so we figured we could all sleep in a little.

On Monday we spent a very beautiful day just relaxing, playing at parks, and visiting with my grandparents. It was a perfect day after 3 days of travel. We also took a few minutes to run our van through a car wash so we didn't look quite so much like hillbillies from Oregon with our dirty, old van (all cars in CA are clean...probably because there are as many car-washes down there as there are Starbucks up here, and they also all seem to be less than 3 years old).

Here are some pictures from that day. I have noticed that a majority of our pictures are of Levi, and I think that is because he actually sits still for more than 5 seconds at a time :P