California Here We Come....

My brother Eric and his wife Kristi just had another baby girl and I being the favorite uncle had to make a way to go and see little Cecily be blessed. My roommate had a couple of buddy passes and the flights appeared to have lots of space so Suz and I decided to go for it and have a quick Cali vacation while at the same time she could meet my some members of the fam.

We had some slight drama on the way to the airport Saturday morning. I had Suzanne call the airline to check us in as we drove up to the airport and they couldn't find us listed anywhere. I called back and again...nothing. They said they could list us but we would need the buddy pass numbers to do this which I didn't have with me since I thought I'd redeemed them the day before when I listed us on the flight. This was making Suz very nervous as this was her first buddy pass experience and it wasn't looking too good so far. I called my roommate but it was early morning and he didn't answer. I just needed to be able to access my email in order to get the numbers so our thinking caps went on. I found a FedexKinkos downtown and called them. They were open and they had computers with internet access. We sped into downtown (thank goodness it was early morning...zero traffic), I ran in, got the info and came back out and off we went to the airport. En route I called Jetblue again and got us listed on the flight. We arrived at the airport 45 minutes before our flight and everything worked out! We got on the flight no problem! WHEW!

We first went to Hollywood (since we flew into Burbank) where we enjoyed an AWESOME breakfast in a GREAT atmosphere at The Griddle Cafe. Very yummy food and a fun place. We highly recommend it. From there we did the famous walk of stars in Hollywood. It was fun to just walk the sidewalks and see all the fun names of people.

Suz with Big Bird and me with Julie Andrews and Frank Sinatra!!!

What made this so funny is that on the flight we had watched an episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy steals John Wayne's plaque and then breaks it. She then comes up with a scheme to get his signature back in the cement. It was hilarious. And then...there we were....looking at these famous people who had signed their names into history!

We drove through Beverly Hills on our way to the Los Angeles Temple. Suz decided she wants to live in Beverly Hills. I had to remind her that I'm a teacher and that we could totally live there...just in a small house :)

We walked around the LA Temple grounds which I love because that temple will always be my temple. Its the temple I grew up going to and watched my parents attend. And it just has its own unique beauty and history!

We met up with Lindy who took us down to Venice Beach. We had fun walking around until Suzanne's foot started to hurt and she was limping pretty badly. We headed home and I ran to get the car while she waited with Lindy. It was fun anyway. Never a dull moment at Venice Beach.

This is us at the canals at Venice. Then Suzanne saw this machine at Venice like the one from the movie "Big". She wanted a picture but as soon as she got close it started to talk which startled her. This is her reacting to the talking machine!

That night we went to dinner with Lindy and Jonathan. Suzanne's foot really started to hurt so I gave her a piggy back the last leg home. We had fun and we're very thankful to Lindy and Jonathan for hosting us.

The next morning we went to Thousand Oaks for the baby blessing and met my parents there. We had a yummy lunch afterwards and then Suzanne and I had to zip off to the airport to catch our flight. Its hard to believe we were just there for a day or so but it was packed and fun and very fun to be with family even though it was so short!