Bridgeway Christian Church

I'm Back!

Gosh, I miss you guys.  As fun as it was, and it was fun, I really look forward to seeing all of you this weekend.  Even just two weeks being gone tweaks my spirit and makes me miss all of you.

So, instead of answering the question a million times (which I know a lot of you ask just to be nice and couldn't care less about the answer) I thought I would give you all a quick lowdown on the vacation time.

I was gone for two weeks and that included the first four days of prepping to go to So. Cal and then three days when we got home to kind of milk the vacation thing before returning to work. 

So, to be honest, the days before we left were rough.  I am the type of guy that likes to do things at the last minute, I hate getting somewhere early and just waiting around. I don't like planning and mapping and brainstorming possible things or making a million lists of things that we can do, should do, or must do prior, during or after a trip. Dang it! Can we just go and figure it out on the fly?

Praise the Lord, I'm married. Suzi is the one that made sure we had the house in order before we left (giving me lists of honey-do's so I ran around like a little kid following mommy's orders), she's the one that made sure the kids had snacks in the car so they didn't die.  She's the one that made sure we got the right groceries when we got down so we didn't eat out all the time and spend money we didn't need to spend. She's the one that packed all the condiments so that we didn't need to re-buy the wheel (ketchup, mayonaise, butter, etc.) just for one week.  So, yeah, God blessed me.

However, I strained under the first few days mumbling that this is no sort of vacation, packing and prepping and drawing it out over three days.  But once we fired off and headed down there it was awesome.

Even the ride didn't kill us. Remember, I have a four year old and a seven year old, a 7 hour ride is brutal for them, especially in car seats/booster seats.  Luckily we decided to leave on night early and got to my dad's for the night to break up the trip for the kids. He lives just north of Fresno about 45 minutes (Chowchilla), so we got to see him and his wife and have a wonderful night and let the kids knock 2 1/2 hours off the trip, so the next day would be more pleasant.  I think that was Suzi's idea too.  Hmmm, I'm seeing a pattern.

I had bought last year, a portable DVD player on sale for the car for $45 bucks at Fry's for another trip, where we never used it. So I broke it out, charged it up and let the kids watch movies on the way down there and plugged it into the car lighter.  That helped a ton.

Once we were down there, I found that the first few days my body carried a lot of anxiety and I wasn't sleeping good and had some panic issues.  Mostly that's due to the element of my psyche that doesn't do great away from home (even though my personality loves it and thrives in it!!!), and the fact that I hadn't gone to the gym in four or five days and my life isn't exactly sports driven or active. Heck, I'm sitting at this stupid computer right now typing to you folks.  Anyway, two days into it I decided to go to the little gym there every day and it helped a HUGE amount. I was peaceful and relaxed. We laughed a lot and had a great time.

We had purchased a week of timeshare online from a guy in Utah, at the Newport Coast Villas. He cut us a deal. This is the same place Russ & his family went with us to last year as families. It's a wonderful location. If you can get in, it's stellar. It's very geared for kids and it's beautiful.  It has two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen so we could make sandwiches to bring to the beach and make dinner. We didn't eat out a lot for cost savings...Okay, now I'm bored, sorry.

We went to Disneyland one day which was out best trip there ever. Little Andie (just turned 4) apparently just turned 40 inches this year so she stood up as tall as her little body could to touch that measuring stick on the rides and was able to go on every ride but one (Indiana Jones is 46" - so I broke my back alone with Jillian).  It was a fun-filled day of 8am to 8pm Disneyland.  I'm not a Disneyland freak (like some of you) so that was plenty for me.

Two of the days we went to the beach (Corona Del Mar - from a recommendation, which by the way apparently is trying to set a record for how crowded it could possibly get; and Laguna Beach).  At the Laguna Beach we were all playing in the waves when a huge pod of dolphins swam buy just outside the waves, probably 15 ft from some of the swimmers and about 50 feet from shore or less. The whole beach ran to the water's edge to see it and they swam parallel to the shore, the whole length of the beach. It almost looked like they were hired to do it (although I'm sure the Dolphin Local Union would have charged a pretty penny for that).  The kids had fun in the waves and sand.  Jillian boogey-boarded for the first time and loved it, until she got rolled twice.  Oh well.

When we finally got home, I took some time to do some more fishing (and actually caught my first big fish as an adult - after a million hours of trying and study) and went to see (by myself, not for kids), the new Batman movie, which was great.  And Suzi and I took the girls to go see a Rivercats game with tickets that someone gave us from the church! 

So, all in all, I was spoiled and all of you should hate me.

But I'm back now and ready to preach too long this weekend.

hang on to your seats, because here we go!

Lance