Lake Powell, San Juan Capistrano & Yosemite

LAKE POWELL
So this year, Susie was able to go to lake Powell with her family. Kelvin stayed home with Simon but Simon had his Grandma Ning come to help out. The boat was Sam's Cousin's time-share (Gordon). The boat was immaculate; probably the nicest house boat the Robinson-Daniels clan ever stayed in. Susie was able to spend a lot of time doing what she loves most...read.

Every day, the meals were assigned out for both preparation and clean-up. Once your day was done, you could enjoy the week without pressure. Here are Sam and Susan at the upper-deck kitchen preparing a meal.

The houseboat had a couple of jet-skiis on the back. There were 2 speedboats, an inflatable trampoline, and of course, water wienies.


Everyone had their time behind the boat. Wake-boarding, and Wake-surfing. Of course, since Susie is pregnant, this is what she spent her time doing on the boat.

Did I mention this was the nicest house-boat they've stayed on? It's better than the Ning House in Palo Alto.

Here's the entire clan that went climbing in a slot canyon.

It was a super-fun trip. A great relaxing trip for the adults as well since there were no kids allowed. The lake level was at the highest it's been in several years. Evenings were spent playing games, watching movies, and laughter.

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO
The Robinsons had no rest as they had back-to-back vacations scheduled. Susie flew into Orange County to meet her husband and child which she dearly missed. Kelvin drove down with his Mom, Lillian and Simon and stayed a couple of days in Pasadena. There he helped assemble a tricycle which he loved. He would do laps in the living while Lillian pushed.

Kelvin and Simon left Pasadena and went to meet Susie and her family in San Juan Capistrano. This was the longest Susie had been away from Simon. She missed him so much. Kelvin was really glad to see Susie too.
The beach house was located on a private road just off the Pacific Highway. The backyard opened up to sand and all of the cousins could play with the pile of sand toys. Storms over the last year brought in a lot of rocks along the shore, but the kids still managed to make it down to play in the water.

Simon loved playing in the white water as it washed up to tickle his feet. Mommy or Daddy would lift him up so that the water would only go up to his knees.

Davis' favorite game is either you chasing him, or him hiding and then jumping out saying "Boo!!" Kelvin caught him with his camera while he was eating; Once Davis saw the camera, he began to shift into stealth mode.
Grace lost her tooth while she was at the beach. She was so excited because it was her first. The tooth-fairy made a special trip from Arizona to give her a special treat. I think she was more excited that the tooth was replaced with something else, rather than what the tooth was replaced with.


Tay celebrated a birthday while the family was out there. We all went out to dinner and came back to a party for him which mostly consisted of cans of silly string. Tay celebrated his birthday by having all his nieces and nephews shoot Brit with the silly string.


YOSEMITE
After having a couple of days to restock the fridge, do some laundry, and sleep in their own bed, the Nings were off again. This time we went to a place where Susie had never gone before: Yosemite. Part of the draw for Susie was not just the great company (Burgons and the Johnsons), but the fact that she could see Yosemite without actually back-packing or camping. We stayed at a cabin about 30 minutes outside of the entrance to Yosemite Valley. The cabin shared its backyard with a golf course.

Simon woke up early, every morning. One morning, we took him out to the golf course...but he had only 1 thing in mind...


...chase the deer that were grazing on the golf course.


The deer had other plans in mind...

We did eventually drive into the valley. Kelvin had made some critical packing errors, so the day was mostly filled with lunch, walking around the valley, and carrying a tired Simon back to the car. We were able to get some great views of Half-Dome.


Don't let this picture fool you though...with all the stuff to see on the ground, Simon didn't really like being slung to his daddy's back all afternoon. He submitted a lot of formal complaints before turning back to the car.

August was filled with a lot of family and friends. We can not think of a better combination of pure joy than to take family with us to enjoy nature's wonders. We are so grateful for the support our family gives us, especially at this time while the family is expanding.

The Ning's Eastern European Vacation

So, it’s been awhile, but it took us…I mean Simon, a little while to actually get adjusted back to the right time zone. Otherwise, he’s been a real trooper thru all the places that we took him. We had an incredible trip visiting 4 countries in 14 days.

Day 1-3: Budapest, Hungary
We arrived on Sunday. It was interesting in Budapest. The taxi driver was INSANE!! It was almost as if he was trying to impress us by how fast he could drive. We met the Salters just in time to watch them go to church. Jared had to give a talk and Kelli had to teach a class lesson. It gave us enough time to set-up a blow-up bed in their living room and crash for several hours. Kelli was nice enough to make us a roast for dinner and that was our first day.
The next day we went with Kelli (Jared was at work) to the market. It looks like a train station but it was a planned building for this type of commerce. We also walked down one of their fancy shopping streets.
On Tuesday, we went across the Danube and checked out Castle Hill. There really wasn’t a big castle up there, but there were some ruins of some and a long history of Castles being built there. Simon enjoyed the view.

Day 4-8: Istanbul, Turkey
Kelli found this cool hotel in Istanbul. It was so small, the ride from the airport, which comes with the hotel, didn’t know how to get there. It was at the bottom of one of the hills (Istanbul is founded on 7 hills, like Rome). Unfortunately, to get to all of the sites, we pretty much needed to get up to the top of the hill to get to anywhere. After the first day, it got easier and easier.This was the entrance to the Topkapi Palace. This was the home of the Ottoman Sultans from 1465 to 1853. The Grand Sultan would hang the remains of those executed for not conforming to his views at this entrance.

One of the courtyards build for the Harem, which means forbidden…meaning forbidden for others to see.

From this vantage point, during Ramadan, the Sultan would wait for the sunset.

The Grand Bazaar. I didn’t think it was going to be this nice. I don't think anyone really thought we would spend more than half a day there. We spun around there looking at great antiques and handcrafts. We haggled our way thru and spent several a little bit of time there each day looking for better deals on specific items.

It was nice having the Salter's there. Jared is ruthless when it comes to haggling. We also were able to get group deals when we were both looking for similar items.

The Egyptian Bazaar had a lot of great spices there. Oddly enough, it was a lot harder to haggle on prices there.

The Hagia Sophia was the largest enclosed building in the world for nearly 1000 yrs. It’s the 3rd largest dome currently. Originally constructed in 537 as a Christian Cathedral until 1453 when Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Turks and it was converted to a mosque.

It's hard to portray the imensity of the edifice. We tried to imagine what types of ancient Christian services could have been held here with such a large building.

The architecture was ornate, and very detailed. The amount of work involved to put this together was amazing to imagine. The age of the building also amazed us because of how well preserved and maintained it is. Simon enjoyed all of it.

The Blue Mosque is located across the street. We were all immediately identified as Americans, and a Turkish Rug salesman helped us beat the lines into the Mosque and guilted us into walking over to his shop to get a hard Sales Pitch. The only good thing about that was that he walked us by the remains of the horse stables of what used to be the Hippodrome of Istanbul.

Halfway thru the trip to Istanbul, we found ourselves doing laundry in our bathroom. I thought this picture pretty much portrayed how it was traveling with a 5 mo old baby. We used purified water to clean out all of our bottles as well.

Beneath the city was carved out a giant fresh water Cistern. When it was re-discovered, it was drained and became a great relic to the engineering history.

On our last day, we took a taxi further down the Bosporus River to city of Ortakoy. There was a hand craft market there. We took a quick family portrait at the port among the fisherman.

Day 9: Recovery in Hungary
We came back to Hungary for a day. Basically it was to do laundry. Oddly enough, the Salter's building was going under some gas-pipeline upgrades during the exact time period that we were visiting. So, in the meantime, their hot water was not available. One of Jared's good friends, 2 stops away, was going to be on vacation in Germany. We were able to stay there a night and do laundry. Everyone eventually went there to get hot showers.

Day 10-11: Vienna, Austria

We had a couple of days to spare so we took a train ride north to Vienna. We were constantly amazed that in a 3 hour journey, you can find yourself in such a different place. Vienna was one of most favorite spots during this trip. There were a lot of reasons why we liked it: the H&M store was like the US Banana Republic, the city was clean, and the place felt like it was frozen in time from the Renaissance.

We stayed at the Marriott in downtown (great hotel) and started off to the Schonbrunn Palace. We didn’t do any tours of the inside, but we did walk the grounds and do the maze. Simon enjoyed the view from the back of the property overlooking the palace and the city. Before heading back to Budapest on the train, we made a quick stop to the Hofmann Palace as well. We definitely need to come back to this place.

Simon enjoys a bit of CNN in the morning

The train ride home was fun for Simon. He enjoyed looking out the window and smiling at the border patrol as they came into the cabin.

Day 12: Pecs, Hungary

We decided to spend this day trying to save a little bit of money and buy some leather bags from their factory in Pecs. Our final destination was western Slovenia and we thought we had this plan down pat. Roads ran slowly and the store had the bags that we wanted but they were at the same price as the ones in Budapest. Jared did some haggling and finally got a hold of the owner of the factory and had them sell us a couple of bags at wholesale prices using Jared’s personal business name.

Day 13-14: Bled, Slovenia

After a very long drive, we ended up in the beautiful lake resort town of Bled, located in the north west corner of Slovenia. Looking back, we probably should have checked a bit on the weather and dressed warmer. We all could have had another layer.

Lake Bled is famous for its cliff-hanging castle overlooking a small island with a church on it. It was rainy but we toured the castle and took a boat ride out to the island. I insisted on having one of the locals row us out on a traditional boat to the island. That was great until on the way back, it took twice as long because of the headwind and the rain which was dumping down on us. Others on the boat lent us their umbrellas to cover the kids.

Day 15: Heading Home

It was a great trip…great to see the Salters and to see so much of Europe. Simon slept most of the way which made it tough to get him adjusted to the time zone shift again, but it was more pleasant for everyone else on the flight.