Out of School and On the Road

Yesterday the boys finished up with 9th, 7th, and 5th grades and today we hit the road for our first road trip of the year.  Destination: Mandalay Bay (Oxnard, not Las Vegas) with stops in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara.

First challenge:  convincing our GPS that we wanted to get to Oxnard via the normal route down highway 101 vs. her not-logical-at-all-to-me suggestion of going down highway 5 all the way to Los Angeles and then heading back up north.  (Before you ask, yes, we do know how to get to Oxnard from Pleasanton all by ourselves.  We just put in the address so that we would know how to get to the hotel once we got there.)

We got on the road at a pretty decent time for this not-so-early-rising family and made it to San Luis Obispo by around 2pm to spend a nice visit with Jay's co-worker/friend and family.  Ken and Sue have an adorable four-year-old Katie (who misses nothing and who I hope my boys did not corrupt too much!) and a beautiful six-week old Molly (who is such a cutie and ignited some serious baby-lust.)

Next stop: UCSB.  I promised Matthew that I would not go overboard with the "this is not how it was when I went to school here" reminiscences but I failed miserably.  That said, it was actually nice to see how much hadn't changed even though it's been (cringing as I'm typing this) 20-ish years since I went to school there.  We got there too late to get into the bookstore (bummer) but (one of) the graduation ceremony(-ies) was happening while we were on campus (which explained why there were no available hotel rooms in Santa Barbara tonight) so there was at least some activity going on.

My dorm room in San Miguel Hall (that was me,  2nd floor, all the way to the left, 20-ish years ago…)

We're off to Anaheim tomorrow but we will hopefully have some time to enjoy the beach dunes outside our door before we have to hit the road.  But tonight we have the sunset from our hotel room:

Comments

[Lori]

That sunset is fantastic! Great capture. And I'm so glad you got to see Ken and meet Molly. We've been hoping to get Katie and the Beaner together for a playdate for 4 years; maybe we a road trip down the CA coast is in order! :-)

[Gil]

I remember visiting you at San Miguel!!. It is funny how all these memories flood back and how much everything feels/seems the same...I had the same experience visiting Westmont... Great sunset picture.