Lessons from the Pro

A few weeks ago, J asked GongGong if he would show him how to play golf when we came back to visit. So this afternoon my dad took the boys to Lick Creek. Rather than let them try to kill the ball on the driving range, he started them off on the practice green with putting.

J lining up his putt

River Road

Since we didn't have far to drive this morning, I let the boys sleep in until 9:00AM, which is really late for our usual road trip schedule. (I hate burning daylight on vacation!) After breakfast, we checked out and drove a short ways over to La Salle, IL for (wait for it) an I & M Canal National Heritage Area passport cancellation. The Lock 16 Cafe and Visitor Center on First Street had the stamp. Too bad we didn't have time to take a mule-pulled canal boat ride on the "Volunteer"!

Rene-Robert Cavalier de La Salle

Double the Fun

Yay for summer vacation! Time for another entry in the Saiki-delic blog!

However, this trip is a departure from our modus operandi.

R flew out on Thursday to meet his parents in Hawaii on their trip to attend his uncle's 88th birthday party and serve as their Uber driver for a week. From his posts on Facebook, it looks as if he is really suffering in paradise - forcing down saimin, reluctantly shopping at Crazy Shirts, and enduring gatherings with ohana. What a good son!

As for me and the boys, we left LAX this morning...

We're Baa-aack

After leaving Point Reyes NS yesterday, we headed down towards Santa Clara. According to Waze, there were a couple of options for ways (haha, see what I did there?!) we could go, but instead of taking the quicker route around the Oakland-side of the bay, M chimed in that he wanted to see the Golden Gate Bridge. 

Then he promptly fell asleep.

And couldn't be roused when we actually crossed the bridge. *sigh*

So, we crawled our way through San Francisco in late-Saturday-afternoon traffic on Highway 1 for naught. Ugh! Torture for the driver, not so bad for the nappers. 

Get to the Point

Of the 28 NPS units in the state of California, we have visited 26 of them. Today we checked Point Reyes National Seashore off our list, leaving only Redwood National Park and Castle Mountains National Monument to go.

College Shopping

M is now in his junior year of high school, so over the past year we have been exploring various colleges just to give him an idea of what each campus is like. Of course, the standard was set with the first one we visited - the University of Illinois! We have also taken tours of UCLA, UC Irvine, and Cal Poly. Since the boys had a four-day weekend for Easter, we left right after school on Thursday for the 5.5-hour drive up to Berkeley.