Vacation Part 4

We left Yuma on Wednesday the 20th and drove to San Diego. We'd neglected to make hotel reservations there...BIG MISTAKE!!!!! We ended up staying in a very overpriced hotel right by the beach...totally blew our vacation budget (which we'd been doing awesome on until this point). One of the reasons we hadn't made reservations before we'd left on our trip was because we weren't sure how long we'd be staying in Yuma - dependent on how the rambunctious boys were for the great-grandparents. We should've called from Yuma, but just never got around to it. We will NOT make this mistake again!

We'd been planning on going to the San Diego Zoo. Brian surprised us with tickets to Sea World. I was less than thrilled with that at first...I'd told him repeatedly that we didn't need to go to Sea World...I was worried about it all being too much for Nathaniel. Well...it all worked out fine. Nathaniel did fine...Joshua loved it (he loves Shouka the killer whale at Marine World in Vallejo, so was absolutely thrilled with Shamu and the other 3 killer whales...in fact, he's decided that he wants to be a trainer when he grows up, so he's really planning on learning how to swim this summer.) And as we were all enjoying our time in San Diego, I was happier with it all.

After we went to Sea World on Thursday, we went down to the beach for about 20 minutes as the sun was going down. Nathaniel wasn't too sure about the water that came rushing up to our feet (the tide was coming in). He would look out at all that water and then look up at all that sky and then wrap his arms around my neck very tightly. Joshua wanted to build a sand castle...I love this picture of him trying to catch some water as the tide came in.

The grin on Nathaniel's face in this picture is priceless...it's become one of my favorites!

On Friday we went to the Zoo. That was a lot of fun. Nathaniel liked the animals a little more than he'd liked the whales (he was kind of frightened of them) We were lucky and he fell asleep for part of the time and that made him a much happier little boy. Joshua, of course, loved it all.

Our cute boys...Nathaniel was demonstrating the activity level of the hippo!

Nathaniel wasn't too sure about the "lion" - Joshua told him it was just a person in a costume, but for some reason, that didn't make much difference to Nathaniel!

We left around 7 or so that night to head part way home. Nathaniel was out before we hit the freeway and Joshua hung on by his fingernails until we drove past the San Diego Temple because he wanted to see it - he didn't really remember it from when we were down there for Tim and Elisha's wedding two years ago. He was asleep within minutes of passing that.

Traffic through L.A. was horrible, but it could've been worse, and we got to our hotel in Castaic shortly before 10. Yes, if you ever must stay in Castaic, Calif. do not stay at the Rodeway Inn...YUCK! But we were too tired to do anything about it, so we pulled the top sheet up and slept on that instead of the bottom one that some stray hairs were on (ICK, ICK, ICK!) We got home Saturday afternoon and boy were we glad to be back. Nathaniel especially since he hadn't been able to cruise around much in our last hotel since it was so nasty and not kid friendly. This was our first big trip in two years and Nathaniel's first of any kind and we did enjoy it, but I'm always glad to get home.