Beach Days

As mentioned in a previous post, our San Diego days with Heather were bookended with beach visits.  Before leaving LA, we stopped and spent an afternoon at Hermosa Beach.  Our weather was perfect, with temps hovering in the upper sixties.  This was ideal for trekking around large animal parks, but kinda cold for busting out the bathing suits.  No boogie boarding for on this beach visit.  We found other things to do instead...

 Like hunt down this famous TV beach apartment!  Do you recognize it?  ;)

And get our pants just wet enough with wave hopping to require a change in the car.

Then, on our last day in San Diego, after dropping Heather at the airport, we spent a morning on the gorgeous Coronado Island.  Here we watched dolphins and marveled over the white, powder-like sand that massaged our toes.  We also made Bucket List plans to return to this super ritzy Hotel Del Coronado for a future vacation. 

After the beach, we started slowly making our way back home.  We first stopped in Camp Pendleton to have one last visit with our dear friends Lloyd and Heidi before they are soon moved to the NATO Base in Italy for 3 years.  We adults drank ice tea and caught up on their ocean-front patio while the girls ran all over the Navy Neighborhood with Lloyd and Heidi's kids, playing basketball, and checking in with walkie-talkies.  It's always fascinating to get a little taste of our friends' life and we wish them every blessing in their next adventure!

  

One more stop for dinner with newlyweds Anna and Derek, where we were able to sit for a few hours and recap all of the week's highlights, completed this fantastic Spring Break vacation!  We saw so many cool things and made so many great stops.  But, the memories we'll cherish most from this trip are all centered around the people we got to share it with.  Starting with meeting Andrew, to reconnecting with seldom-seen cousins, to doing vacation life with Auntie Heather, to getting to hug our friends, "Arrivederci", to reliving favorite wedding memories with Anna and Derek over artisan pizza.  This was a trip that was all about loved ones.  For having these amazing friends and family members in our life, we're counting our blessings yet again.

Safari Park

Though there are countless fun things to do in San Diego, we decided to get the discounted two-day ticket and spend a second day with the animals, this time in the equally awesome Wildlife Safari Park.  This too was a great day, and surprisingly really different than the zoo, though we still spent 9 hours in the park, once again walking 10 miles.

One of our favorite things to do was feed the lorikeets!  A small cup of nectar lured these pretty, brightly colored birds right onto your arm.  The last time we did this, the lorikeets were apparently starving and attacked us as soon as we entered their enclosure.  This time was much more peaceful and enjoyable...just a tad to Heather's disappointment! ;)

We had more wildlife land on us in the butterfly garden!  Ella was especially delighted that this huge Blue Morpho Butterfly landed on and stayed with her the whole time we strolled around here.

As you saw in the video, this park allows you to actually walk through the lemur enclosure!!  We weren't allowed to pet them, but to have them so close was so cool!

The apes, and their young baby, entertained us for quite some time.  I especially loved how the mom carried her little one around,  Dave had to give it a try.  The apes made it look much easier!

Another highlight of this park was the SUPER up-close lion encounter we had!  This is glass, but the lions were hanging out right by it...roaring, fogging it up, and spraying Delia right in the face with pee!  Notice her hat and clothes?  We joked that these lions must not have been Cubs fans.

The headline attraction here is the 30 minute tram ride though the open air fields, where animals roam freely and interact with one another as they would in the wild of Africa.  We rode this multiple times and enjoyed different guides and animals doing different things each time.

This park is all about conservation and bragged about how their efforts have brought several species in the wild back from the brink of extinction.  While we were there, they had 5 condor eggs ready to hatch!  It was neat to learn lots of new things while having these up-close animal encounters, in a land that was designed to transport you to another continent.  

We used much brain power and treads on our shoes over these two days! We had to end another exhilarating, but exhausting, day of animal sighting with a Footsie Wootsie massage.  Still just a quarter! :)

Fun Zoo Videos

Call the little ones over!  Here are some of our favorite videos from our day at the zoo!

A hungry koala bear climbing all over his tress to get the eucalyptus.

A hippo swimming (walking really) underwater.

Crazy chimps ganging up to catch a wild squirrel in their enclosure.  Don't worry, we never saw them catch it, though they got it by the tail a few times, they always let it go.  We think they were just playing.

Ella having a conversation with an exotic bird.

Actually from the Safari Park-- we got to go inside the lemur home!  The lemurs were walking right past us!

San Diego Zoo 2017

 My sister loves animals just as much as, if not more even than, we do!  When planning a SoCal Getaway with her, we knew a day at the unlike-any-other San Diego Zoo, which she has never seen, was a must.  After a stop at LAX to drop off Andrew, a few hours at Hermosa Beach (which I will write about later), a delicious meal at the Cheesecake Factory, and checking into the hotel we'd all share, we were ready for some animal adventures!  This is our family's 3rd trip to this world class zoo, but we are nowhere near tired of it!  Each time you visit is totally different because the attractions are living creatures completely capable of surprising you!  On this trip, every animal seemed especially active and interesting to watch!

We know to head to the koala area first.  These snugly sweethearts, which are my favorite, spend 23 hours a day sleeping, but when the zoo opens, they are being fed and are at their most active.  They were putting on quite the climbing show for us!

Delia would not let us wait too long before we visited her favorite part of this zoo-- the pandas!  They too were just being fed and were active and fun to watch.

 Delia was in Panda Heaven.  Though she put in more than one request, I was proud of her for being able to walk out of the zoo without yet another panda stuffed animal. ;)

 After my favorite and Delia's, we decided to make sure everyone else saw their favorites too.  Ella loves sloths, and though we were able to see this slow-moving wonder, cradling a baby even!, I could not get any good pictures of her.  

 Auntie Heather loves the hippos.  We even got to see one of them swimming underwater!

 And Dave always gets a kick out of the entertaining primates.  Each habitat we visited kept us captive for a long time.  The apes had playful babies.  This impressive orangutan dad was checking Dave out!  And the chimps were chasing a wild squirrel around their home!

There are so many things I love about this zoo: its massive variety of animals, the beautiful setting built around each creature, and how close up you feel (even through glass)!  Ella shared some kisses with this penguin.

 This is as brave as I will ever get with a rattlesnake.

 This goat was a fan of Heather's drink.

 We had a staring contest with these fascinating elders of the Galapagos Islands.

 And the girls got nose-to-nose with a tiger!

The SD Zoo is not for the weak!  We walked 10 miles on this day and spent all the way from open to close, 9 hours, at the park, still barely seeing everything.  I love that the time and miles slip right by, though, because the landscaping is just so lovely!  There are multiple aviaries in which to slow your pace and just take in the beauty.  In one aviary, Heather spotted this tiny hummingbird on a nest!  When it flew away, we saw that it had a teeny egg in there!

With all those miles hiked, we like to take advantage of the free double-decker bus and sky buckets that move you from one end of the zoo to the other.

We were so happy to share this zoo day with Heather!  We'll remember swimming hippos, hungry koalas, baby monkeys, grand tortoises, cuddly pandas, the porcupine that sneezed and almost killed us, and crazy old Loretta forever!

Anna and Derek are Married!

My cousin Anna, who is sort of like a third sister, married a man who was created for her this weekend.  Her lovely wedding was in LA and over our Spring Break, so it worked out perfectly to not only attend the wedding, but then share a little Southern California vacation with my sister.  So many wonderful new memories were made during this week!

One of the first fun things we got to do was meet Heather's new boyfriend, Andrew, who is just the nicest, warmest, most fascinating guy!  He and Heather actually met in the operating room!  He's an orthopedic surgeon and she was an OR nurse!  It took less then 24 hours for my girls to fall completely in love with him, which I realized when I looked over at them holding his hands during Anna's wedding ceremony! :)  Time to just catch up with Heather was a joy too.  I'll never forget walking into our hotel lobby late Friday night as we pulled into town and having the girls drop suitcases and run into Auntie's waiting arms.  

The wedding was at a gorgeous outdoor venue and was packed with old high school friends and family from my mom's side.  I saw cousins I haven't seen in almost 20 years and my mom's oldest brother-- the only member of the family still living.  If you know Anna, you won't be surprised to hear that every detail was thoughtful and intentional.  She walked down the aisle alone, but then stopped at a reserved chair at the front and laid her beautiful bouquet on it to honor her dad.  She and Derek wrote their own emotional and powerful vows.  The love and passion these two had for one another was just bursting out of them throughout the whole ceremony and there were not many dry eyes among the guests.

Afterwards we took lots of pictures.  Above is the whole K Clan (minus just a few who did not travel for the wedding).  Below are the cousins, Grandpa's Girls, including Kerry and Courtney, who live on the East Coast with their families.

 Not only were Anna's details so thoughtful (like bags of 80's themed gifts waiting at the girls' table setting), but they were SO FUN too!  Our tables were divided by "Famous 80's Movies Duos".  We were at the "Wesley and Buttercup" table (Some other tables were "Johnny and Baby", "Goose and Maverick", "Han and Leia", "Chunk and Sloth", and "Indy and Marion".)  To get to the buffet, we had to play "80's Movies Name that Tune", and then enjoyed a play list of classic songs from that era all night.  Our favor boxes were filled with Pop rocks, Push-Pops, Big League Chew and other nostalgic sweets from our childhoods.  Anna also decided to forgo the dreaded bouquet toss, and instead presented her flowers to the couple who proved to have been married the longest in an anniversary game (my aunt and uncle-- 46 years!).  We just loved how she took this embarrassing tradition and flipped it on its head to honor special guests instead!

 Another highlight of the night was watching Ella and Delia fall in love with their second cousin Leah, the teenage daughter of my oldest cousin Kerry.  I explained to them what a second cousin was, and Ella adorably told me, "Well, Leah feels like a first."  Too bad this lovely young lady is all the way on the other coast-- she'd made an awesome babysitter! ;)

After a fabulous feast and the best toast we've ever heard at a wedding, it was time to dance!  I am proud to say that our family shut the dance floor down, staying late until the girls were actually falling asleep in our arms!  This was such a great time of laughing and bonding with my cousins!  Ella quickly claimed Andrew as her partner and let him twirl her around all night!

It was such an honor to be a part of this wedding crowd-- it was clear we all had such love and admiration for Anna and Derek.  This was not just a special wedding because it was family, but because Anna worked hard to make it unique and HERS.  Her attention to detail was all over it. Everything came together perfectly, and we all had so much fun celebrating the happy couple!