And Here We Are!

We're here in Edmonton!  Our travel day was this past Wednesday.  We drove from Sacramento to San Jose and stayed overnight at Darren and Julie's home.  They're good friends of ours and it seems like the only time we see them is once a year when we're in town in need of a ride to the airport!  Joking aside, we value them so much and we always enjoy hanging out with them.  Grace and Jenny reconnected very easily, and Claire was very excited to have a new "best friend," though it took Jeremy quite a while to warm up to everyone. 

Darren was able to call up some of Jason's childhood friends to join us for dinner.  We got to see Jon and Sarah and their new one-month-old son, Ben, as well as Jason's former roommate, Rob. 

The next day, Jason wanted to visit Los Gatos, his hometown.  We headed to his favorite park growing up, Vasona Park (Oak Meadow).  He has fond memories of the Wildcat Railroad and wanted to let our kids experience riding the train.  They loved it (though Jason says it is quite different going there as an adult)!   Afterwards, we walked around a little and let the kids roam the play areas.  We ate lunch at Armadillo Willy's, one of our favorite places to eat in San Jose before Darren dropped us off at the airport.

Waiting at the airport with a really goofy kid!

For the first time in a long time, it was an uneventful trip to fly from San Jose to Edmonton.  The kids did great (no throw-up, no running away from the Immigration line), there were no delays, and we didn't upset travelers for holding up the security check at the airport with all of our stuff (most notably, our 2 laptops and 2 portable DVD players- they all had to be taken out of each of our carryons and checked individually).  When we arrived, Jeremy and Grace immediately went up to both of my parents with big hugs (I had been worried that it'd take Jeremy at least 2 weeks to warm up to them).  Since then, we've taken it pretty easy, which means I don't have a whole lot to blog about.  We've slept in, watched tons of cable TV (we don't have it at home, so we watch a lot of it while we're up here), gone to several nearby playgrounds, eaten a lot (food will have to be a blog post all on its own!)...  

On Thursday, we went to the public library here to check out some books.  We always do a lot of reading while we're up here.  Jeremy wanted to check this book out... but we decided to leave that one behind!



This morning, my dad took the kids out for breakfast (that's a big deal- I was worried they would misbehave, but he said they were great).  Earlier, Jason and I were able to have some alone time- we headed to Whyte Avenue, a wonderful little neighborhood with unique businesses.  We got a chance to talk, walk around, browse, and even went for our first bubble teas of our trip!  A very nice and relaxing start to our trip!