Vacation in California, part 1

Dale and I are old. How old, you ask? Well, we got an invitation a few months ago to return to Caltech for our TEN YEAR college reunion!!! I thought at first that there must have been some mistake -- our five year reunion I could accept, but to acknowledge that we've been out of college ten years is to acknowledge that we are getting old!

We thought about it for only a few minutes before deciding to go. After all, if we really were old, the best way to hang on to our youth would be to spend time with friends from our past, in the city of our past!

So, the second weekend of May we packed up and flew to California. (We checked four bags plus a carseat, for two adults and a baby for four days. Gone are the days of deciding Thursday night to go to Mexico, getting in the car and driving all night long, taking nothing more than bathing suits and toothbrushes for a long weekend trip!)

Anara and Adelaida meet over dinner

We arrived at LAX Wednesday afternoon, and our first stop was, of course, the Richmond Bar and Grill. We are fortunate enough to have friends who don't work, friends who work a couple of days a week, friends who work really odd hours, and friends you are much too young to work, all living in LA, so Grant, Jamie, Ron, and Anara all met us for a late lunch at the bar. It was good to sit at our old table again, catch up with Jeff, eat a killer burger, and talk and laugh with good friends. It could have been our same group eight years ago, except Liz, Matt, and Brian weren't there and we came in with two sets of bibs, baby spoons, and diaper bags. Well, things change, I guess!

walking through the Rose Bowl park

After lunch, we headed up to Pasadena to check into our hotel and put Adelaida down for a nap -- which sounds like a great plan, but backfired on us when we put Adelaida in the crib for her nap and didn't leave the room. Ever since she was two weeks old, Adelaida has slept in her own room; we learned this weekend that she is pretty insistent about that -- she wouldn't lay down to sleep while we were in the room with her. This was the first of many nap-time and bed-time struggles we had on this trip; I don't think she took a single nap the first two days we were in California, went to bed when we did, and still woke up by 6:30 every day. This resulted in Adelaida sleeping an average of nine hours a day instead of her usual fourteen. Needless to say, she was a bit cranky on this vacation.

playing with blocks of wood at Kidscape

Despite the lack of sleep, we found time to do a lot of fun things. Our second day in California was Thursday; we called Grant and suggested a trip to Kidspace, the children's museum located at the Rose Bowl. Kidspace was only 2 1/2 miles from our hotel, so we decided to walk; Grant was going to leave in thirty minutes and lives ten minutes away from Kidspace, so we figured we'd arrive at about the same time. Three hours later, we called Grant to see where he was, and he assured us that he'd be leaving within ten minutes! Ah yes, going anywhere with a baby really does take three times as long as going anywhere without a baby! :)

Adelaida finds the slide at Kidspace

Kidspace has the potential to be awesome, but was very disappointing for us because there were so many school groups there. I counted at least ten different schools, most with thirty to fifty kids but a couple of school groups with a hundred kids each. There were preschools and elementary schools, and most of the kids there were quite a bit older (and bigger) than Adelaida, so it was hard to find space for Adelaida to play with anything. Kidspace has a great climbing area, but there were so many five-year-olds playing in it that they would have just run over Adelaida. So, we walked around a bit at Kidspace but didn't end up doing very much.

Adelaida takes her first nap of the trip in Dale's arms

After two hours at Kidspace, we confirmed with Grant that he wasn't anywhere close and suggested meeting for lunch and a swim in our hotel pool instead. Dale graciously offered to carry Adelaida as we walked back, and I let him, not realizing that he had an ulterior motive. Adelaida's lack of sleep up to that point meant there was a very good possibility she'd fall asleep in our arms as we walked back, and sure enough, she did! Dale had the privilege of carrying a sleeping baby on our walk back to Pasadena, and Adelaida took a reasonable nap. We met Grant and Anara for lunch at Saladang (one of our favorite Pasadena restaurants), then headed back to the hotel for an afternoon swim.



It had already been a fabulous vacation, and we had only been in California for twenty-four hours!

I'll post more about the vacation later.