Just Couldn’t Keep Up the Blog While Traveling

I have missed too many good blog posts while we have been traveling this summer.  I thought I would be able to keep up but while my home computer is great, my work computer is too slow.  Our traveling computer was just as frustrating.  I didn’t really want to be on the computer much while traveling any way.

Actually, my husband and I did something totally spontaneous for our 19th anniversary.  We traveled without aid of any computers- not even a GPS.  It was crazy, walking out of our hotel, not knowing what direction to head to find breakfast.  After wandering around the city for almost thirty minutes, with no good restaurants in sight, we ended up eating in our hotel.  We had to do that for dinner, too.  How did we every travel before?

The rest of that trip was just as adventurous but those are tales for another post.

I will share a bit of our Summer family vacation.  It was obvious earlier this year we needed to make a big effort to get away with our three children.  Our daughter has been dating a young man for a short while and we knew she intended to marry him.  This would be our last Summer as a single family unit.  Next Summer, our family will be one member more.

Nothing was set in stone, that is there had not been a proposal, when I made our plans to visit Southern California.  As the Summer rolled on, the ring eventually came.

We didn’t have any real plan, except to see my brother and get wedding advice from my once wedding planner sister-in-law.  She is very good at giving advice about this subject; mostly because she is a good listener and she knows all the details of orchestrating a wedding.

My brother and SIL live in Huntington Beach, CA.  We happened to be there for the US Open… of surfing, that is.  Visiting the town and beach area made Disneyland look not-so-busy.  It seems there were about 80,000 people there.  We went one evening to check everything out.  I think we would have stayed longer if it hadn’t been as cold as it was.  Really, there wasn’t a lot to see since no one was surfing when we went.  Our sweet boys were very unimpressed by the incredible amount of skin and they were rather uncomfortable.  I like that about them.

Of course we took the obligator trip to Disneyland.  Huntington Beach is really pretty close.  We just went for one day.  Everyone tells us all the great things about Disneyland.  I know, I’ve been.  It’s fine and we were mildly entertained for what it was.  We just are not amusement park people.  Really, it wouldn’t matter if we went on a less crowded day or any number of other things people say that make Disneyland more enjoyable.  God has created an amazing world to go see.  That’s my amusement park!

I loved San Diego!  I could, and will, go back.  I loved everything about it, especially the beach, where we got to watch the military aircraft flying.  Wow!

I think the kids would have liked it a bit more if there had been some shade at the beach.  That was a little hard to take for too long, so we didn’t stay very long.  All things considered, I actually prefer the Oregon Coast, or the Northern Cali coast.  Quite frankly, the beaches in So Cal are very dirty.  Why do so many people think Earth is their trash can?  We watched a woman spill a drink in a restaurant and then walk away, without getting help to get it cleaned up.  My husband had to get someone to clean it up.

My brother was such a sweetie and took us surfing.  My kids were up first.  I wanted them to get their time.  I was going to get out there but it was a lot colder than it should have been, plus the NAZI party of the beach patrol closed down surfing at our part of the beach.  Ok, they were allowing surfing at Huntington but not five miles down the road, where there were obviously less people?  So I’m a little outraged, I guess.  I really didn’t get it.

This was by no means our kids’ dream vacation.  We got to see our family and we didn’t have to do any house work.  I know they appreciated the break from the daily routine.  We appreciated and enjoyed being with them.  They are so grown up, and yet I still think of them as my sweet babies.  (I don’t tell them this though.)

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