California pictures......finally!

As I wrote about last week - we went to California to see Nicia & Joe over the school's fall break. The entire week was really a treasure for us. At 16 months, Alyssa was just so cute! Here she had put her pajama shorts on her head:

Time for prayer!

On one of our first days there, Dave had a meeting in Cambria, an hour north of Santa Maria. We all went with him and headed to a beautiful beach while Dave got to have fun giving his presentation. :) Nicia and Emily had a blast in the water, going in a little bit, then running away from the water as it came in. Nicia was such a great sister, getting in and actually playing with Emily. She loved it!

Emily finally got totally soaked:

Holding what she called her "cheese"

Dave came after his presentation and spent more time on the beach with us.

Here's a cute picture of Nicia & Joe that day:

Saturday we went to Avila Farm where they had all kinds of things for fall, pumpkins, petting zoo, hay maze, hay ride (we skipped since we'd already been on one), and yummy fudge.

We took lots of pictures here, but they all had shadows. Sorry!

I love Alyssa's face here....

Of course we had to go geocaching while we were there. There were some we never found, but there was one we had to kind of go on a little hike to get. We found it, and it even had a California geocoin in it, which apparently, is kind of rare!

While looking for one of the geocaches in a wooded area, we came across this really cool labyrinth, which if I remember right, was a replica of one in Europe. It was huge! We had a lot of fun finding our way to the middle - very cool.

Alyssa was the smart one - she just climbed over the rocks to get to the center

"Hey Grandma, what's taking you so long? Just climb over the rocks!"

Another day we got up early and went to a beach that was known for its sand dollars. We were only able to find a few small ones, but we had a great morning there, playing in the water and sand, and Dave was able to do a lot of metal detecting too:

Notice the car in the background of the picture above. This was a really cool beach - they let us drive right down on the sand, not far from the water's edge!

As I said in my previous post, we were able to see Dave's Dad and Marion on our way home. Emily had a great time playing with her Grandpa:

Here are some pictures of Aunt Emily and Alyssa. Emily was such a good aunt - she played with Alyssa a lot and was so cute looking after her:

Reading Alyssa's new book

Toot! Toot! Here we come!

Just hangin' out on the sand together - precious

Family: Life's Greatest Blessing