California Dreaming

Hello Friends and Family,

We're back from a fantastic trip to California - our only complaint is that it just wasn't long enough!

Here are a few pictures to give you a sense of how we filled our days during the trip...

After landing, we quickly refueled and headed directly to the winery that hosted our wedding reception. It was wonderful to visit with kids this time, and to pick up a special bottle for our 10th anniversary next year. You can see that Nalini really loves the place!

Here are Sonali and Jason enjoying the view at Fogarty Winery.

We spent the first night at Paige and Tyler's house in San Francisco - I haven't been back to CA since pre-kids, so it was lovely to see old friends from my grad school days and to visit with their wonderful daughter Reid! We tooled around SF for a day, and one of our stops was the Aquarium by the Bay, which has a tunnel aquarium that you can walk through (and even sleep over in).

We walked from the aquarium to Pier 39's famous sea lions. Their population has been dwindling, but they are still noisy and entertaining!

From San Francisco, we headed up to Napa for three days. Although we didn't do the winery loop with kids in tow, we did begin a tour of playgrounds in Northern California. Here is my cousin, S, monkeying around with the girls.

This is the same playground - isn't it amazing how massive these redwoods are at just a regular, neighborhood park? They are fantastically huge at the state parks.

This is a photo of the mansion of the resort where we stayed in Napa. I made some important connections at the conference I attended, and we got in some good pool time as well.

Before we left Napa, we had a brunch with all the local cousins. Sonali took to her Didi right away, and we're hoping to get the little cousins together again before too long.

After brunch, it was back to San Francisco to visit with a few more dear friends over the weekend. Here are T and R, friends from Stanford Law, with their two munchkins, at the SF Exploratorium. Afterwards, we walked to Chrissy Field to enjoy a warm sunny day on the beach at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge. I only wish we had more time to spend there!

The next day we visited A and T at their lovely new home in the Mission District. They took us to a secret playground (see a theme here?) before we sat down for dinner. Nalini was too busy to pose for a picture.

You see, she had fountains to visit. For all the Grandmothers, we did change her into dry clothes right away. =)

On our last morning in San Francisco, we were lucky to spend some more time catching up with Paige, Tyler, and Reid. We had been enjoying their company throughout our days in SF, and a sunny morning in the park was a great end to our trip. Here are Jason and Tyler figuring out a new piece of playground equipment we never saw before.

And here is the gang at the park climbing wall.

If only we had a few more days! But we did squeeze in some quality time with many family and dear friends. Let's hope our next trip to CA isn't another 6 years from now.

I tried to show some restraint by only featuring some of our pictures, but there are many more available through the link below.

California 2010

Ciao for now. We'll write more soon after we see my brother this coming weekend!