California Christmas

This year The Reynolds’ Family headed out to California to spend Christmas. My brother Eric lives in San Jose, right outside of San Francisco, so he had a great week of events planned for us. The kids did great on the flights and with the time change. They were troopers with our long days of adventure.

We took a motorized trolley ride around San Fran to see the sights. Bryce thought this was cool, but even more cool he loved walking over the “Golden Gate” Bridge. What an amazing view, but boy was it WINDY!!!

Nana and Papa spent the day with the kids at the San Jose Christmas Parade where they got to see Santa. Bryce really enjoyed meeting the big guy, but Sadie was not too fond of him. Nana and Papa gave her the benefit of the doubt as she was tired and hungry!

While they were all at the parade we headed up to Lake Tahoe, Nevada for some skiing. This is an activity that Eric has taken up since being out there and thought we would all enjoy it. The resort we were going to was not open, due to not having enough snow. So, we went to a resort called Heavenly where they had about 4 runs open with man-made snow. We were all psyched (my two brothers, Eric and Aaron; Aaron’s girlfriend, Ashley; and Jared and I) until we saw the signs “NO BEGINNERS”. Well, most of us had not been on skis in over 15 years, so we were pretty much beginners! Well, we had to get down the mountain somehow. With a few lessons from Eric we all set out, 4 of us (not Eric) wiped out right away, losing skis and left with the reality of how you get up with wearing skis and climbing up to get your lost ski and trying to put it back on while on a 70 degree angle! I am not going to lie, it took us an hour to get down the first time, we finally realized the longer you could stay on your feet the faster you would go making you scared out of your mind but knew it was the fastest way to get to the bottom!

We braked for lunch and when we came out I saw 2 people in 2 minutes go by on stretchers into the ambulance. One girl I had started at the beginning with and found out she was a beginner as well. Reality set in for Jared that this mountain was too dangerous for us being that we could not take the risk of getting injured when we have 2 little ones to care for. So, we set our sights at getting off the mountain, we had one more run to reach the Gondolla. We went to get our skis and mine were gone! We had to contact Ski Patrol and arrange for a snow mobile to take me down. I talked the guy into giving Jared a ride on the snow mobile, because if he didn’t they might as well take him out on a stretcher now! Safe and sound on low ground, we have our sights on skiing again, but starting on a smaller scale! Kudos to Aaron and Ashley who kept up with Eric the entire afternoon!

We spent another day seeing the Redwoods and going to the Pacific Ocean at Santa Cruz. We were all amazed at how big the Redwoods are. Bryce loved that there were some that had “caves” he could climb into.

Sadly the week ended and it was time to say our goodbyes and head back to Indiana. We had such a great time visiting and cannot wait to go back and visit and see more of the Bay Area. Jared told the mountain that he would be back to conquer it!

Enjoy the pictures from our trip...