Our Adventure in Marina California

Sorry for the novel, you don't have to read it!! On February 7th my mom got a call from my Aunt Suzie, her sister to inform her that their dad had died. I have never met William Damon and my mom hasn't seen him for a little over 25 years. To make a long story short none of us sought him out for good reason and he never attempted to rejoin the family in anyway. So my Aunt went over and arranged the funeral and burial so my mom wanted to go up to support the efforts of her sister! It is also the close of an empty chapter in my moms life. So I wanted to go with my mom so she didn't have to go by herself. Then we decided to make a little trip out of it so Briana and her kids joined us. The drive up north took us about five and a half hours, we had stopped at Carls Jr. to get some dinner and it was empty so Lincoln and Nixon were doing laps in the store. Nixon fell and I have no idea how but he sliced his ear open. Then we got back on the freeway and we were looking for a Walmart or Target to get some antiseptic and bandaids. I think in our looking for a store we managed to go off of the 5 Freeway onto the 99 Freeway but then we found a Target. Chris gave us directions to find the 5 Freeway and so we got to where we were going it just took us an hour longer than expected. We pulled up to our hotel at about 11:30 and went up to our room. We had a very long night. Good thing I had Briana there because there would be no way I would have gone out running if it weren't for her and it was a good thing we went because she perked up considerably after our run. We only ran about two miles because we had to get ready for the funeral. It was actually a very sad funeral because there were probably only about twenty people there including all of us, my aunt Suzie and cousin Lisa and the bishopric of his ward. So there were about ten friends. It was very sad because he could have had a completely different life. He had five beautiful children, many grandchildren and great-grandchildren whom he had never met or cared to meet. We had a fun day though, these pictures are backwards but we went to a duck pond in Marina next to Larry's house (where William lived). The kids had fun, Rocky wanted to maul the geese right when we got out of the car. Grammy stopped him, but they had fun watching them. We stopped at 

7-Eleven to get some hot chocolate and the boys got some doughnuts. Yummy!! Then we went to a fruit stand off of highway 1 and they have tons of fields of artichoke plants. It was awesome, I love artichokes!! So we went there with my aunt and cousin right before they took off for their long 15 hour drive home to Idaho. Last thing of the day was we stopped at the beach and Lincoln, Nixon and Grammy went down so the boys could play with their monster trucks for a few minutes. It was about 45 degrees outside we were freezing!! 

Here we are at the fruit stand and Rocky was sitting in front of this sign pointing at all the letters. Then he pointed at the S and made the sssss sound for the letter S. He did the same thing for R. Earlier that day we were going into our hotel and we were staying at a Ramada and there was a mat in the entry way with big red letters that said RAMADA. Rocky was pointing at all the letters saying a A. a A. I guess watching The Letter Factory is paying off. I love those movies, because they are learning something and they love to watch them. 

The guy I asked to take our picture was kind of old and I don't think he really knew how to take a picture but there we are at the Pezzini fruit stand. With Lisa's crazy black hair!! I went through that stage and I think I was about her age too. 

The three boys were having so much fun and I was going crazy keeping track of all of them. They loved the candy aisle and looking at all that was available for them to choose from. 

They are so funny, they found this little spot and climbed on in, I had to make room for Rocky because he couldn't be left out!

Climbing at the duck park!!

Watching the ducks and the geese. Of course I sat them all next to each other, that doesn't happen very often. 

We went in the wrong direction on the trail to find the ducks but they were still having fun running around. 

Kicking the tree oh what fun!!

CHEESE!!!