This final stage of our Spring Break was perhaps the most special. Our dear friends/cousins the Mattingly came to spend Easter and their Spring Break weekend with us. We tried to pull out all the stops and show them some of our most favorite places.
First stop was the beautiful Oakland Temple.
We took lots of pictures on and around the temple grounds then listened to an Easter musical performance (which unfortunately put most of us to sleep...) followed by lunch at The Cheeseboard in downtown Berkeley for perhaps the best pizza I've ever tasted.
Easter Sunday basket hunt - I'm still not sure how the bunny fits into Easter, but hunting for the basket is always a fun way to start off the morning!
We're trying to make sure that books become a more frequent piece of our holiday celebrations. It seems like a good way to help us understand the holiday and enjoy the traditions. We'll see how that trend continues...
Thank you Macy for choosing such cute flower girl dresses for these little munchkins so we could use them for our Easter dresses =)
Lili took the Easter egg hunt very seriously this year. She had her hunting gear on, a big empty bag, and half of her candy was eaten before we were finished!
It was so fun to have our good friends the Jaramillo's join us for the Easter egg hunt. Their cute daughter Eva is so sweet and the girls loved having her there with us. I think we overestimated the number of eggs we needed for these three little munchkins?
The next day's forecast was promising, so we decided to head out to the beach. It wasn't exactly a hot, lay out in the sun type of beach day, but it's hard not to have a good time when you're at the beach. We had good snacks, great company, and amazing scenery.
And no matter how cold the water is, these girls just can't stay out of it.
Clearly they got that gene from their dad, who will take a day of surfing even if the water is sub 60 degrees!
When we learned that the Mattingly's would be joining us for the weekend , we immediately told them to get ready for a ride. Riding the Golden Gate Bridge was one of our most favorite San Francisco activities and we couldn't wait to play tour guides. So we walked down to Embarcadero, rented a bunch of bikes and hit the trail.
View of the bridge through the piers at the Presidio.
View back on the city from the hills above Fort Point.
A note about this activity: although Ty, Julie and Cline were super excited about this bike riding adventure, my two teenage cousins were not exactly thrilled with the prospects of such a long bike ride. They wound up sharing a tandem bike, which they were also not thrilled about, and they were not exactly afraid to let us all know! What got them through the ride was the knowledge that on the other side of the bridge we would enjoy lunch in Sausolito then a leisurely ride back across the Bay on a ferry. So, you can imagine their disenchantment when we learned that all the ferries were booked and we would be riding back up and over the bridge =) Amazingly, after about the first fifteen minutes of the return trip, they somehow broke through the grumpiness and were laughing and cracking jokes the whole way back! It was so fun to see their transformation, and a good reminder as a parent, that maybe it's a good thing to push your kids past their comfort zone!
On our last day in the city we hit a lot of the classic San Francisco tourist spots:
we drove down Lombard street (and just had to get a shot of the truck making those crazy tight turns)
visited the Painted Ladies at Alamo Square (and of course sang a few rounds of the Full House theme song)
and enjoyed (well some of us enjoyed and some endured) a dinner in Chinatown! Of all the restaurants we've explored in San Francisco, I think our Chinatown experiences have been our least favorite. Maybe we're not finding the right places and maybe we're just not big Chinese fans? We've given it a pretty good shot, but I think I'll take a burrito in the Mission next time =)
And what would a trip to San Francisco be without some shopping in Union Square to help push the limits of fashion?!
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