Category: Our Family

Our next leg stretching stop was at the Donner Memorial State park near Truckee, California shortly before the California-Nevada border. There was a small indoor museum that had things that the Donner party most likely had with them.

It was a really small museum, only one room, so it didn’t take us very long to see it all. There was also a video that they were going to show, but we didn’t have time to stay and watch it. So we went outside to check out the monument.

The height of the monument represents the height of the snow that the Donner party got stuck in. Totally crazy to be stuck in that much snow with no shelter of any kind. I would have loved to spend more time here, but we really had to be on our way as Kyle has to go back to work tomorrow, and we did NOT want to be driving all night long. We will have to visit this place some other time and explore it further. 🙂

Being up late last night, we didn’t get up as early as we would have liked this morning. But, also because we were out late last night we didn’t bother with unpacking the van, we just had everyone sleep in their clothes. So we were that much closer to being ready to leave this morning when we woke up. I did bring in stuff like the hair brush and diapers so we could make ourselves look decent. 🙂

We had breakfast, we finished loading the minimal stuff that we had brought in and then it was time to load up the kids and get going. We drove for awhile before making a quick stop to fill up the gas tank and use the bathroom. We knew that we would need to stop a few times to stretch legs, so we tried to pick some things that we wanted to see as our places to take a break. Our first stop along our trek home was the Sacramento Temple. The kids, especially the little ones, were glad to have the chance to be out of their car seats and to be able to move around.

I did not pose this picture. They just happened to get to the fountain and stopped to look at it, I came up behind them and snapped the picture. Like how they are all just about evenly spaced, it’s just my four girls and they are standing in order from youngest to oldest totally coincidentally?

Then because children are naturally attracted to water and fountains, the boys joined them.

Lydia went around to the other side to see if she could get close enough to touch.

The grounds were lovely, as temple grounds usually are. How sweet it was to catch Jeremy pointing out flowers to Adam. 🙂

I caught Lydia totally posing for me:

Right next to the temple there was a church building, so there were lots of cars in the parking lot, today being a Sunday. And in front of both the temple and the church building, there was this nice park. Roaming the park were some wild turkeys! We tried to get close enough to get a picture, but I think the noise of so many kids scared them off. This was as close as we got:

I just love this picture of the temple peaking through the trees:

The last of our planned adventures for the day was to visit Muir Woods. I was impressed with how close it was to the city, yet when we went up in the mountain it was quiet and felt like the rest of the world was far away. The drive up and down the mountain was still quite nerve racking though. The road was narrow and very curvy and I totally expected a tire to go off the edge with every turn. The parking lot was full and we had to drive a ways to find a bit of road that had enough of a pull off that was big enough to park in, and hope there was a space because apparently lots of people wanted to be at Muir Woods today. 🙂

We asked at the ranger station about a junior ranger program and they gave us some booklets for the kids to work in while we walked around. Not too far into the woods we came to a huge cross section of a tree.

The kids were impressed with the massive size of some of the trees.

I had noticed this tree laying on it’s side. Apparently it fell over, but it’s roots were able to keep it alive, and now the branches are growing straight up with smaller branches growing out like they are totally separate trees. I found it very interesting.

The perspective of just how big these trees are compared to us:

At one point Dinah decided to give the tree a hug.

So Chloe wanted to hug a tree too.

A couple of the kids found some roots sticking out of the hill and thought they would make the perfect chair.

One of the kids called this the “rainbow tree”:

We saw several trees that were hollow, this one happened to be along the patch and therefore, got explored.

As it was getting later and some of the kids were getting grumpy, we decided it was time to head back and find something for dinner. Liesl offered to run ahead and get the van and meet us in the parking lot, while we made our way to the gift shop and bathrooms. The gift shop ended up being closed by the time we got there, so we just made the kids use the bathrooms. While we were waiting for everyone to be done, some of the kids were attracted to these bear statues.

When everyone was gathered back up, we met up with Liesl and got loaded up in the van. As we headed down the mountain a fog began to settle too. We were just hoping to make it down the mountain before the fog got so thick that it would be difficult to see. Thankfully we did make it down, and the fog didn’t go all the way down the mountain.  Then we had to drive back through San Fransisco. Kyle was using his phone’s gps to guide us back to the freeway that we needed, but it’s wasn’t a very good route. It took us right through a whole bunch of hills. Between every intersection we were either going up a hill or down a hill. I really don’t like driving on those hills, and I was totally grabbing the arm of my chair and the handle on the door in anxiety the whole time. Kyle then made the comment that we just stay on this road for another 15 or so intersections (I don’t remember the exact number, but it was enough that I was NOT pleased with the thought of having that many more hills to deal with). I replied in a very unhappy tone “Are you kidding?” Liesl thought that was totally funny, but having to go down these hills in a large vehicle like ours, when our brakes were being funny was just NOT fun! We got on the freeway and we had to head back toward the Oakland Temple since we left Liesl’s car there. Since we were originally planning on starting our journey back home at some point today she drove separately to the temple, then to avoid paying two tolls on every bridge she came in the van with us. But we weren’t able to pickup Liesl’s car. She left it in the temple parking lot, but it was now quite late, and the parking lot gates were closed and locked! We had a good laugh over this. It was funny, just because it added to our adventure. Liesl was saying that Ian won’t be happy about going to pick it up tomorrow though. We went to McDonalds to get some food, and then it was so late that we decided to just spend the night at Liesl’s and leave first thing in the morning. 🙂

Our next destination of the day was the Golden Gate Bridge, better known to the kids as the bridge that George of the Jungle jumps from to save the guy. 😉

It was was rather cold and quite windy when we got out of the van. So we didn’t stay very long, but we walked around a bit and got some pictures.