Family and Friends

Family picture with my BIL, sister, mom, dad and of course our family!

What a happy boy!

We enjoyed a nice night out… without the kids for a change!  Old Town San Diego has always been a favorite spot of ours.  We used to enjoy going to Casa de Bandinis’s before it was relocated.  We found a place to park and wandered into a Mexican restaurant where there was actually a line of people waiting to get in!  Why in the world would we eat Mexican when we live in Mexico?  Simple.  The Mexican food in the states is 100% different than the Mexican food in Mexico.  I can’t find cheese enchiladas in Mexico!  Use yellow cheese… you can hardly find yellow (or cheddar) cheese in Mexico.  Olives or sour cream? Forget it.  Those are all American style ways of making Mexican food.  After dinner we wandered around the shops and little botiques before heading home to rescue grandpa from 5 tired kids!

There is only so much fast food a family can take!  After spending almost two months on the road, our whole family was ready for as close to a home cooked meal as we could get.  Our kids ordered vegetables!  They enjoyed the corn, green beans, and carrots the most.  We actually stopped at Cracker Barrel several times on our trip after this stop.  Cracker Barrel was having a contest to collect stickers to win an RV and they gave you one sticker for each person in your party… with us that was 7 each time we ate!  We did not win, but it was fun trying to collect the stickers!

This was a fun day!  We had to decide between driving through the Smoky Mountains or letting our kids get out and explore Wonder Works.  Even though we really would have enjoyed seeing the Smoky Mountains National Park, the kids, and mom and dad, needed a break from the car!  The kids enjoyed exploring Wonder Works and Japheth and daddy got to climb a rock climbing wall.

We decided to stop for dinner at the food court of this mall and took the picture of the sunset before going in.

The highlight of the petrified forest was seeing the actual Indian drawings on some of the walls.  I would not, however, call it a forest.  All of the “trees” were of course laying flat on the ground, but even then, they were few and far between and in the beginning we did not realize that that was ALL we were going to see during the driveing part of the tour.

Our kids

We had pizza and pasta at Round Table Pizza before heading over to the park to let the kids run around before heading out again for the day!

Our kids enjoyed seeing the airplanes at the China Lake AFB.

Every day the sprinklers in front of the house / hotel we were staying in came on at about 5pm.  We let the kids run through the sprinklers for some old fashioned fun.  Hannah enjoyed it a few times but David wanted nothing to do with it!

We have a few things to sell!  Anyone need a party grill for tailgating season?

Enjoying a park by the beach in Santa Barbara.

This was really fun!  With this 10 person bike, our family and the Sobrevilla family enjoyed an hour riding around Solvang, California.  Solvang is a little city with Dutch roots.  Most of the houses and stores in the downtown have Dutch architecture.  If you like wandering around shops and quaint towns, then this might be a destination for you!

We enjoyed some double hand scooped ice cream while in Solvang.

After Solvang, we headed down the coast to Santa Barbara where we spent an hour at the Santa Barbara Pier.

Japheth really liked the toy selection!

After the pier, we headed downtown and found a Farmer’s Market.  We decided to walk around and ended up in an open air mall area.

More pictures of the Farmer’s Market.

We choose Monday to visit Solvang with our friends the Sobrevilla family. Unbeknowest to us, about 95% of the restaurants are CLOSED on Monday night in this small tourist town!  We found this restaurant that was completely packed out with people so we accepted a table on the balcony even though it was coooold.  Being outside was probably nicer for us as we were the only one’s with so many kids at the restaurant… most of the other diners were couples out for a romantic weekend!

Check out the Dutch architecture behind this group photo shot!

It is fun that our kids can make friends wherever we go.  As we visited other cities later, our kids saw pictures of the Sobrevilla kids at various places and say “Oh wow!  There is a picture of our friends!”

Our kids enjoyed eating the green beans more than the chicken!

Me wearing my “mom hat” and feeding Hannah and David.