98 Caramels: Summer Adventure #3

We barely had time to catch our breath and/or get sick of fog, and then it was time to head back to SFO bright & early for our flight to DENVER!

We made a long overdue visit to Uncle Gavin and Aunt Amy's new house in Whittier. They took us to a splash pad, a neighborhood playground, and out for a yummy dinner at Steuben's.

Aunt Amy hooked us up with super-cool sleeping bags and coloring books, and finding/cornering/petting Sydney the Cat was a popular past-time.

We also went to the Children's Museum and made giant bubbles, launched paper tube rockets, made a ball float in jets of air, and kind of got a headache from all the mayhem.

We also made a visit to our good friends in Boulder. Audrey & Grace were excited to share their Bouncy Water Slide Thingy.

I think this may be the first time Brennan & Lucie have played outdoors with a garden hose. Between the postage-stamp sized paved yard, summer fog, and the Great California Drought, breaking out the sprinkler and Slip-n-Slide is not on the agenda any time soon.

Also Boulder has some cool playgrounds:

And when it gets too hot outside, there's a big basement playroom for dressing up and playing hours of hide-and-seek. (Since I was always the seeker, it may have just felt like hours)

Grace was so good at hide-and-seek, I had to give up and more or less beg her to come out on a few occasions.

Lucie, not so much:

Her brother as well:

John and I tricked Brennan into going on a hike under the guise of showing him Audrey and Gracie's secret hideout. He's gone out with me & Roux in the Mt. Sutro Open Space and kept up just fine, so I thought he'd do OK. But it appears that hiking a misty forest trail is not the same as the Rocky Mountain Foothills in July. Along the way, I was informed that: it was too steep, he didn't like the sliding on the downhill parts, there might be a bear, he didn't like this hike, he wanted to go home, and, by the way, it was too hot.

But....he made it!

The reward for all that hard work? Planes Fire & Rescue, in 3D. With popcorn. Much more his speed.

I don't really get the 3D movie thing, but am forced to confess, if you're going to make a 3D film, an animated feature about anthropomorphic airplanes fighting fires in an imaginary national park standing in for Yellowstone or Yosemite is not a bad way to go.

On our last day, I had to go the convention center and get my continuing education hours, since it was what started this whole trip in motion in the first place. The dads & kids all went to Water World, of which there is no photographic evidence, since iPhone and Water World are two words that probably do not belong in the same sentence. We do have one picture of the aftermath: