Yay! Julie graduated from Biola this past Saturday. Much like my New York Graduation trip, we went for a little trip these last few days a little north to Ventura and Santa Barbara. We first stopped in Simi Valley on our way up to visit the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
Once you get out of the LA area, nature seems to beautify before your eyes. It’s amazing!
Check out the pictures I took of the trip at Flickr.
The Colorado Desert that is. The family and I had the opportunity to travel to our next-door neighbor state of Arizona over the weekend to attend a wedding. None of us had ever been there before, except for Dad who says that he went when he was a student.
We left on Friday afternoon at about 4:30 and, due to all the traffic coming out of the LA area, arrived in Goodyear at about 10:30. We didn’t know that Arizona was in the Mountain Time Zone, so when we checked our cell phones, we were surprised to see that they said 11:30.
We didn’t get to do much the next day. We drove to downtown Phoenix and drove around for a while before heading off to Chandler to visit Rawhide, an 1880′s western town that Mom discovered. It was really fun there! We all rode a stagecoach and Julie and Jakie got to ride a camel. We didn’t spend too much time there, because we had to head back to Goodyear to get ready for the wedding at 5 o’clock. When we passed by the house that the wedding was going to be at, there was no one there, and we saw that the mother of the bride, who was outside throwing out the trash, wasn’t even dressed for the occasion! We called Liz and she told us that the wedding had been moved to 6…strange that they didn’t tell the guests! To kill the hour we had, we went to go see some great model homes in the quickly developing suburb that is Goodyear. The houses were very, very inexpensive compared to the LA area.
We returned to the wedding, and, as usual, everyone and everything was running late. The ceremony finally started at about 7:30 (Mountain) and lasted for about five minutes. The reception started right after with a pretty big Banda band playing loudly. Mom and Dad wanted to leave quickly, but the mother of the bride insisted on us staying and actually gave us and some other old friends prime seating (away from the band) and allowed us to get our food before everyone else! All in all, it was a good wedding. We were able to see some friends that we hadn’t seen in a very long time.
We left Arizona early Sunday morning, at about 8:30 (Mountain) and arrived at about 1:30 (Pacific DST). Arizona doesn’t observe DST, which started the same day, so it was neat to still be on “Arizona time” when we got back home.
We’re planning on going again for Spring Break to see the Grand Canyon this time.