California Trip

A few weeks ago, having planned to attend the Whatcott reunion in Tropic on Aug 5th, I decided to take a few extra days off and take the family on a road trip, going somewhere we'd never been before.  I had a hankerin' to see the ocean, and having done southern California many times, we decided to go a little further up the coast.  The drive was long but fun.  We have a Primary songs CD that we played for part of the way, and Soleil sang them the entire time they were playing, with Rhett and Jesse occasionally joining in.  Soleil sits right behind the driver, which is usually me, and I have to say, she has happy feet.  She was kicking my seat the whole way, especially when we had in popular music.

We had packed a couple of coolers of food and drinks to keep us on the road and save a little money.  I had made ten sandwiches, cutting them into little quarters so that they were easy to eat and the portions were kid-size.  I thought this was a great idea; and it was for a while.  But I soon learned I was not going to be able to sell the family on sandwiches for the whole trip.  Late on the third day, Jesse finally sabotaged the sandwiches, being the last one to eat one, he took the bag containing them and stuffed it under the seat in front of him instead of back in the cooler.  We found it the next morning, so they were obviously not fit to eat.  The little scoundrel.

The first night we stayed in Wasco, CA.  Not a town I've ever heard of before, and quite small, but we had a very nice stay at a Best Western there.  We had the pool to ourselves, and played in it with the kids for about an hour and a half.  Rhett and I had races up and down the pool, getting some good exercises, and Soleil spent more of her time "water bending."  However, she told me that she doesn't know how to "fire-bend" yet, so she asked that I teach her how to do that.  That should be interesting...

After getting done at the pool, we went up to the room, dried off, and ordered Pizza Hut delivered to the room.  I drew the short straw, and slept on the floor since we had only two queen beds.  Basically, I was the night watchman, because I was not sleeping.  I guess I can't complain, though, because when I got up, I saw that Soleil, who'd slept with Ang, was sleeping exactly sideways.  Ang must have had about 6 inches of sleeping space.  I swear, I think little kids have a built in compass, because no matter how they start out, they always end up sleeping sideways with their feet in your ribs, having rotated exactly 90 degrees.

One of the Pools at Hearst Castle - Neptune Pool

Ang has always loved unique architecture, and even did a report on Hearst Castle near San Simeon, CA, so we decided to make that part of our trip, and drove out there from Wasco for a tour of the Castle the next morning.  Luckily, the Duck family had lent us their Tom Tom, which was awesome.  It helped to ensure that the "map in my head" didn't lead us astray, as so often happens when we travel.  We got to the Castle visitors' center with just enough time to see the video that gives a history of the Hearst family and how W.R. Hearst came to build his castle.  It was very interesting.  The tour was great.  Trying to imagine the work and cost of that project back in the 1930's, when equipment was so much more primitive and computer technology was non-existent, was very difficult.  The property is very impressive, and is amazing considering when it was built.

Running from the Surf

After the tour, we had some lunch and then drove up Highway 1 (which runs right along the coast), to Monterey.  The scenery was beautiful, and every five minutes or so, Jesse shouted out that he saw a whale.  I am pretty sure he was spotting rocks out off the coast, as his "whales" were not moving, but, who knows.  Before getting to our hotel, we stopped at the beach and played around a little, running from the surf as it crashed onto the beach.

Our second night we got our nightmare hotel.  It would have been nice enough, but we found ticks in the room.  Not Good!  Jesse was all excited because we had "tic-tocs" in our room.  After getting only the clothes out that we needed for the next morning, we packed everything up and I hauled all of the suitcases back out to the van, which, to our knowledge, was a "tick-free zone."  We were freaking out that the kids might end up getting bitten by one of those ticks.  We were glad to get out of there.

Rhett Keeping Watch

The next morning, we had breakfast and then went to the beach for a few hours.  Our intention had been to see the tide pools, and all of the sea life that gets trapped in them.  We hit the tides right, but the pools were pretty much bare.  Maybe we were in the wrong places.  We still had a good time though.  The kids chased squirrels all over (and they were everywhere), and Rhett climbed some pretty tall rock outcroppings--he was king of the world.  We also saw what I think were a few seals.  They were a little ways off, though, so we couldn't be certain.

After the beach, we headed up to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which was nice.  There were a lot of cool things to see, though it was a little disappointing in that there weren't a lot of "big" items (I had thought they had sharks).  For the price of admission (about $120 for our family), I'd probably have expected a little more.  However, it was a good time.

From the Aquarium, we headed out of town and had a nice lunch in Salinas before heading down the backside of the mountains and staying in Atascadero, CA.  This is also a town we'd never heard of, but we had a nice stay at the Holiday Inn Express there and found a really good hole-in-the-wall Mexican place called Garcias for dinner.  The Hotel staff was cool and let us eat the take out in the breakfast room rather than taking all of the kids out to a restaurant.  Saved us a lot of time and hassle.

The next morning, prior to leaving, I took Soleil down the hall to get a paper (the USA Today's were there for the taking).  I stopped and told her to run over and grab me one.  She apparently thought we were up to no good, because, rather than just walking up and taking one, she snuck over behind some furniture and began to work her way toward the papers.  It was hilarious to see her sneaking around.  When we finally got it, I offered her a section, at which time she exclaimed, "Oh my gosh!" as she picked the Sports section.  It had an article about Michael Phelp's speed suit getting banned.  As I told her about it, she was as unimpressed with Michael Phelps as Chad Ocho-Cinco had been, saying that she thought she could beat him in a swimming race.

Wind Farms Between Wasco and the Coast

Finally, we headed back to Henderson, following nearly the same route we'd taken on the way out.  We had been surprised to see that there are a few oil fields in the Wasco area and a lot of vineyards.  The drive was really very nice.  It gets a little bleak East of Bakersfield, but West of there it's quite enjoyable.  We finally got back to Henderson late on Tuesday.  We quickly got the laundry going and started to reload for our trip to Utah (the next morning) where we planned to go to the Whatcott reunion in Tropic, UT on Thursday.