I Sea You Lion on the Beach

Our last full day in California began with my parents prepping for a morning meeting by watching a few Mormon Messages. This quickly gained the attention of 3 little boys who were eager to help their grandparents spiritually prepare for the day. 

My parents left for meetings while we left to hunt sea lions. 

Every day we were in Cali, it got 10 degrees colder. Our beach walk was a little chilly in the morning. 

We found them!

We smelled them!

We accepted their stench and their weird neck poses (check out the one just to the left of Eli's head). 

We requested the boys not get too close to the sea lions, which led Carson to infer they were dangerous and would attack him, so he stayed a football field length away from them at all times, but Eli and I got a pretty good view of them!

We strolled along the beach for a while.

We made it to another group of sea lions. I was trying to get a picture of Carson and told him to pose like a sea lion. This was his sea lion interpretation. 

With time to fill in the afternoon and the cool weather providing the perfect conditions, we decided to try out a hike right by my parents' house. The part I was sure my boys would love -- we'd be hiking a volcano!

Carson came up with the idea to leave "x" marks all the way up the trail, I think so we knew which way to go on our way back? He stopped every 10 feet and left his mark. 

Made it easy for Lincoln to keep track of "boys." Lincoln has always had a hard time saying Carson's name. He has reverted to calling Eli by his name, but he calls Carson "boys." 

It was a bit of a walk before we even made it to the volcano, and then once we were hiking the volcano, it was straight uphill! Selfies were taken while we caught our breath. 

Jeff kept warning me the boys would never make it all the way to the top of the volcano, but they proved him wrong and hiked with ease!

We made it to the top!

I was expecting some kind of evidence that the hill we were climbing was, in fact, a volcano at some point, but we didn't even find a hint of lava rock. I held out hope once we got to the top there would be some kind of divot where the lava once erupted from, but no sign of that either. It was a glorified hill, but the boys still thought it was cool. 

We followed Carson's markings all the way back down the "volcano" when their marking sticks turned into sniper guns somewhere along the path. 

My parents met up with us for dinner at Texas Roadhouse! 

Then it was time for us to head back to the cold. 

The cold hit us sooner than we expected. Thanksgiving traffic had been annoying on the way out, but on the way home, it was unbearable. Somewhere around Scipio, they completely closed the freeway down! For over 3 hours the freeway was at a standstill for reasons still unknown to me. 

We were stuck pretty close to a freeway exit, so we weaseled our way off the freeway, sure we'd be able to take a back road past the problem area. We weren't the first ones with this idea. All the side roads were jammed. Cell phone towers were clogged and not allowing our phones' GPS to work. We were stuck. 

The longer we just sat in a still car, the more irritated the kids began. They do awesome in the car...as long as it's moving, and we had already spent the entire day in the car! We were practically home and making good time until the torturous traffic jam. 

As our impatience grew, so did our overconfidence in the Yukon's 4-wheel drive. Jeff dared to take us on a road that soon turned into a dirt road, that soon turned into a dirt road climbing a snowy mountain. I tried to document the conditions, but this is the best I got: 

The blurriness is due to the endless moguls we were taking the Yukon over, and the snow growing heavier with every climb of the mountain. The one oblivious person who was overly enjoying our treacherous excursion was Lincoln. He squealed in delight each time we hit a bump and then would promptly shout, "Again! Again!" until we hit another one. We probably spent 45 minutes 4-wheeling on the mountain, which ended in us realizing we weren't going to make it over the mountain, so we back-tracked off the mountain, only to glance back at the freeway and see everything was still completely at a stand still. 

We ended up going through Delta, around the back side of Utah Lake, and finally made it back to the freeway around Thanksgiving Point. Never again will we travel for Thanksgiving!

Other than the journey home, we had a lovely time in California, and we're already dreaming of when we can return.