For those of you who don't know who Nanette is, she is my sister right next in line after me in our family of 8. She lives in Camarillo and just like I wrote in my Rants and Musings Post about our Non-Traditional Traditions, whenever I go to California, I always make a trip to her house, sometimes two or three times. I'm gonna copy and paste what I wrote then because I'd just be repeating myself...
-I always visit Nanette's B&B. Her house is so amazing to stay at. She's the most awesome host, makes the most amazing food, shows you amazing epiphanies she's had you want to become a better person, and makes you feel totally at home, but doesn't make you feel like you are getting in the way with her daily life. You sort of just join in with her goings-on (you actually become a part of it... she has you come to her block party craft days, school singalongs, and drives around to see their Christmas lights). She also tries to help you get stuff crossed off your "list", gives you coupons for buying presents, and on top of that plans extra fun outings. I might get stressed out with hosting like she does, but if she is, she never lets on. I love her kids with all my heart and I love hanging out with her husband Myles cuz he's seriously a cool cat and so laid back... yet such a task accomplisher as well.
Two days after we arrived in California, the girls were whisked off by Southwest Airlines to Utah to see their father. It was just Spencer and I so I hopped on the Amtrak train since Nanette's house is about 1 1/2 hours from my mom's and I didn't have a car, it's the best way to travel there. Tell me you could only imagine Spencer's excitement with this trip.
Getting there was interesting. It was raining and we had to park pretty far away. I had only one bag for both Spencer and I, but I also had both our coats, my laptop bag and even considered bringing a stroller. I thought I had plenty of time but couldn't get the ticket machine working. Little did I know the ticket machine was not for the train I wanted and a nice woman pointed me to the ticket office (that clearly had NO sign saying ticket office). I was used to train travel being in Europe but all of this threw me off a little. So as I'm lugging everything around, all spencer wants to do is jump in the puddles.
I get into the ticket office and there is some lady asking a bunch of "would be" questions about a trip a few days later. I was really stressed but finally the ticket agent asked her to let a few people get tickets. The train literally pulled into the station as he was printing out my tickets and I was dragging Spencer by his arm to jump onto the train. Thank goodness for a little elderly couple that needed extra assistance or I would not have made it. Sorry, but as you can tell, I had no time for pictures.
Spencer, of course was doing his "shakey man" as we call it, and was in total shock and excitement. He's used to trains but it seems like he gets just as excited each and every time. I had brought our iPad so he spent most of the time watching movies or looking out the window for more trains when we'd pull into another station. Seriously, Nan, this is the only way to travel.
In Camarillo waiting for Nanny to pick us up...
A picture Nanette took as she was driving up.
Cousins!!!!!
I'm sad I didn't take more pictures while we were there. I started to get into Instagram, so I posted a lot on there. for those of you with an iDevice, Instagram is pretty amazing. I won't go off on too much of a tangent, but it's all about pictures, and most people think it makes good photos look bad, but it's actually making your crappy cameraphone pictures look better. But there is a newsfeed to see your friends' pictures and comment on them. I'm actually loving it more than Facebook. Anyway, it would be great to see some of you on there.
Okay, so here are the limited pictures I have at Nan's house. Some of the things we did were take walks to the park,
Christmas shopping (it's a bummer when babies fall asleep in the car on the way to go shopping),
make Christmas goodies, get over jetlag,
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| (yes that's me next to him, I think this was about 2 p.m.) |
attempt to stay up late but we always fell asleep early, me next to Spencer, her next to her kids or at the computer, and we attempted to attend the Startup Cookie Exchange (our extended family's annual get together).
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| These were my cookies that I had on a nice tray but they kept sliding around so I dumped them onto a cookie sheet. I ended up overbaking them so they were hard. I tossed them eventually, but not until I was fed up of holding the cookie sheet on my lap. |
The minute we got onto the freeway it was stopped traffic. It basically would have taken us 3 hours to get there so we got off the freeway and tried to kill time shopping. We ended up at TJ Maxx which was very dangerous to be at. Spencer found an entire Thomas section with every track set he has seen on his fliers. He literally started dumping them into my cart.
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| (Don't worry, I didn't get all of these, but I did get quite a few. It was tempting that they had so many of the ones we'd usually have to buy online.) |
This is Spencer at Nan's house cleaning up the wooden track so he can have the blue track again. You can't hear it but he's singing, "Clean Up, Clean Up."
Saying goodbye and going on the train...this is in Camarillo.
Saying Goodbye... We were a little nervous we had gotten on the wrong train.
Arriving in Fullerton to seriously beautiful weather.
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