Ryan's Road Trip - Part II

Ryan continues his tour of the San Diego area. The latest information from yesterday is:

Old Town SD today after visit to first CA Mission in SD. Pool for hours, finally off to Legoland tomorrow.

Below is a picture of Ryan with his friend Brooks and Brooks' siblings.

Call Me Maybe?

At the A's game this weekend, Jimmy Fallon appeared on the Diamond Vision screen at the Coliseum with a singer that looked familiar. Then the song started and was instantly recognizable to me because my kids have been singing to this song all summer.

The crowd was over 30,000 which is a lot for an A's game so it was quite the sight to see all the people bopping to the song. I noticed that they were doing some sort of hand motion to the song but it was not what was happening on the video with Jimmy Fallon. Now I know the rest of the story.

Ryan's Road Trip - Part I

Ryan is on his road trip to Legoland and the San Diego area with his buddy Brooks and Brooks' family. This is suppose to be a birthday present for Brooks, but Ryan seems to be getting a good deal out of this too. Brooks is Ryan's friend from preschool. Although we don't live near each other, somehow the two of them have been able to maintain a good friendship that has resulted in Brooks' request to have Ryan join them on their family trip.

The trip included some creative scheduling as Brooks' older brother was in a soccer tournament in Sacramento which meant that they would be traveling north to go south. They had contingencies for their travel south depending on the results of the tournament. We have not heard about this, but we do know that they are approximately in the intended destination. We received the following text messages and photo from Brooks' mom.

Monday morning: On the grapevine. Kids doing great!

Monday during the day: Hi mom! Went swimming, shopping at wharf, eating Mexican now. Built B's presents and loving it! Drove by Legoland and cried, "we want to go now!"



Monday evening reply to Ryan: Hope ya'll had a relaxing day today after that drive.  Give Ryan a big hug for us and tell him we love him : )

Monday evening reply back: He says I love you too....I haven't forgotten about you yet dad.

Flight to Columbia

The last week of school Ethan had quite the treat. It was a delayed birthday gift of flight. A good friend of his, Ben, has a father who is a pilot and has his own plane. Ethan's birthday gift was a voucher for a plane ride. So on June 10, Ethan was able to collect this most unique gift.

The original flight plan was to fly to Willows in northern California with the goal being a game of helipad baseball. This was game that Ben and his family had invented while on one of these day flight excursions. However, the weather gods were not in a cooperative mood and travel plans were changed to Columbia, a small former gold rush town in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

On the flight over to Columbia, Ethan was given the chance to pilot the plane. What a treat indeed!

Summer Vacation 2012

As we wind down another summer, we are also winding down another road trip to Seattle. We experienced the hottest days in Seattle since...2010. This past weekend temperatures in Seattle hit 90 degrees for the first time since 2010 we were told. We felt every bit of those 90 plus degrees as grandma and grandpa's place does not have air conditioning.

We started the week experiencing an aerobatic show by the Blue Angels that marked the end of Seafair. We were somewhat amazed that one of the two main routes across Lake Washington would be shut down for the Blue Angels show not just on one day, but both on Saturday and Sunday. Maybe this is not as drastic as shutting down the Bay Bridge, but the bridge was shut down for two hours at midday with the other path across the lake now a toll bridge.





Another less than usual event that we took in was the King Tut exhibit that's at the Pacific Science Center through the first of 2013. This supposedly is the last time that this exhibit will be shown in North America, perhaps until the next time that it is shown (tongue in cheek humor?). Although a couple of our kids seemed to take in the exhibit in record time they were patient enough to let the rest of us take our time to enjoy the 100 plus artifacts on display.





Finally, one of our new adventures was kayaking on the bay, or more accurately on Lake Union. We rented kayaks and set off for an our on the high seas...sort of. Yuki had Ethan and Lianne in a triple. Dorothy and Naomi were in a second kayak, and Ryan without an oar and I were in a third kayak. Ryan thought that he wouldn't be able to paddle so he didn't want to take one with him, preferring to be a sightseeing passenger. We looped around the lake taking in the sights of the Seattle skyline and other locales where we were previously on the other end watching other kayakers go by. Near the end of the tour, Ryan decided that he would give paddling a whirl and found that he could do it. We were on a one-hour clock since we had the return the triple kayak in that amount of time since it was reserved for others. Next time we'll take a longer trip.







Okay, one last photo that we need to share that needs no explanation.

Hot Day in Seattle!

Although it's cooled some, it was still hot enough to play matador with the giant water fountain at Seattle Center.

Blue Angels