BITTERSWEET ROAD TRIP

Earlier this week I found out my grandma was on life support. On Tuesday she passed away peacefully...she would've been 90 in a few days. She had been sick a long time and now I believe is in a much better place where she can truly rest. Since she is the last grandparent on both sides of our family, we wanted to make the trip to San Francisco to attend her funeral. It is a bittersweet trip....bitter because of the purpose but sweet because I will see relatives that I haven't seen in over 15 years. Some of them, Don has never met. These are all my Filipino family on my dad's side.

We decided to drive because it was way too expensive to fly so we left Wed and headed up to Hesperia, CA to stay the night with our best friends from college, Chris and Gayle. We survived west Texas with them. ha! They are also babysitting our dog for us. I would've taken photos but left the camera in the car and was too tired and lazy to go get it, so I'll have to do that on our way back. Nate has survived the trip BEAUTIFULLY. We borrowed a friends car and it had a dvd player in it, which was a life saver when Nate got really fussy in his car seat. But even then, we only needed it twice.

Nate was a charmer at our friends house. He had a great time playing with their kids and all the toys they had! After we left Chris and Gayle's house, we took the long way from Bakersfield to San Fran, up the coast to Monterey. It was absolutely gorgeous. What a great Valentine's Day drive! We saw elephant seals, crystal blue water and clear skies. By the time we got to Monterey, we were both exhausted and hungry, so we forfeited the rest of the coastline for the quicker interstate toward Oakland. We were only 15 miles from our hotel when the traffic bogged up. We finally made it though and stumbled bleary-eyed into our hotel room. Nate immediately went to sleep in his play pen, thankfully, and we got some much needed rest. I will post some road trip photos shortly. Our hotel has WiFi so I can update our trip. We'll be gone for a week. More later. Got to get ready to meet the relatives for lunch. Looking forward to some great authentic Filipino food too!