California vacay!

As mentioned earlier, I recently went to California for a week with my fam bam bam (read: family). I really just wanna share some pics and maybe say some stuff, so here we go.

These first pics are from the best highway rest stop in the continental US. (I say continental because I would be willing to bet a few bucks that Hawaii may have some cool rest stops, too.) After driving hours through hot and monotonous Nevada, this part of the drive was very welcome.

I didn't take any other photos for the rest of our driving day, but we arrived safe and sound in the Bay Area to some seriously delicious BBQ'd food and plenty of laughs with family. My family is good people. 

The next morning, we went to the beach! I used to hate the beach. Then, we went to Mexico for Christmas one time, and I learned that beaches can be warm (something all those California and Oregon beaches had never bothered to mention), and I decided that I might could like the beach. This year, on this beach day, I liked the beach. It was warm, it was sunny, the guys played football, we all poked anemones and held snails, Mariah was bitten by a crab, the sand burned our feet as we hiked, etc. It was my favorite beach day yet!

This day was great because we also were able to meet up with our friends from Japan, which was a happy coincidence that has now happened two years in a row. We love spending time with Yuki and her family, but since we have yet to visit Japan, we sure appreciate their summer visits to the US!

And no beach day would be complete without jumping pictures. It's a Shirley family tradition! But I'm always far more entertained by the landing pictures than I am by the ones where we're all in the air. Here, you can see what I mean:

We're flying effortlessly...and then we're landing hard. Work it, Mariah!

Speaking of Mariah, look at these cute pictures where she's holding babies:

After the beach, we stopped by the It's-It factory store. My mom loveloveloves It's-It ice cream sandwiches (two oatmeal cookies + vanilla ice cream + chocolate coating) and the factory store was literally two minutes from our hotel, so a quick trip over there was inevitable. And of course, everyone needed ice cream, so we overwhelmed them with our large group right before closing time (oops). It was the perfect follow-up to the perfect beach day.

After that, we didn't have anything scheduled, but we didn't particularly want to retire to our hotel rooms while it was still light outside. We GPS'd our way over to the nearest city park and just chilled for a while (literally...we all were quite burned after the unexpectedly sunny day at the beach). It was probably one of my favorite parts of the trip! But I only took pictures of Ensley, and they all turned out blurry, so...just know that we had fun there.

Aaaand this is enough pictures for today, so.

To be continued...