California, Part 1

My brother got married in Oakland last weekend. We made a quick trip down and back and we're still exhausted. To try to break things up a little bit for Kaylin, we drove to Eugene, OR on Thursday and stayed with Eric's cousin. She has two little boys and they live on an amazing piece of property there. We had a lot of fun catching up with them. Unfortunately, Kaylin threw up during the night so we didn't sleep all that well. Thankfully she was fine in the morning.

We stopped for gas in southern Oregon and Eric was threatened with a $10,000 fine for trying to pump his own gas. I'm not sure if he forgot we were in Oregon or if he was tired of waiting for the gas pumper guy to come over. The gas pumper also reprimanded Eric for calling him "sir". Eric said, "Thank you, sir." The guy turned around from 15 feet away to say, "Hey man, don't call me that. Call me "bro"." Uh, okay. For future reference, apparently white guys in southern Oregon prefer to be called "bro".

Did you know that California has its own border crossing with customs? Okay, so it's not actually the border patrol, but we had to stop and tell them that we didn't have any fruit or plants in our car. No stamps from California in our passports, oh well. Our next stop was lunch in Redding, CA. Thanks to the GPS we found a great park.

Eric wanted to stop at the water park in the background on our way home. We didn't. This park was next to the Sacramento River.

We arrived at our hotel in Emeryville (Oakland) around 6:30. Then we headed over to San Francisco for a couple of hours. Thanks to the GPS we were able to find 2 parks with great views of the Golden Gate Bridge. And thanks to Eric's inability to follow the GPS we even drove over the bridge. Luckily the GPS was able to get us back to the hotel alright without making us drive back over the bridge which would have cost us $4, which we didn't have.

Alcatraz!

This is my favorite shot.

The next morning (after a phone call from the front desk of the hotel letting me know that we'd recieved "multiple" complaints about running in our room) , we drove around UC Berkeley. It's a beautiful campus and we were actually able to see a lot of it in the short amount of time we had. I only took one picture and it looks much cooler in person.

This building was flying a Cal flag and it looked like a castle. We were too close to get a picture when we were on the other side of the fence.

After that we drove 10 minutes to the Oakland Temple for my brother's wedding!