Family Vacation (Executive Summary)

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I have not had time to write anything substantial for a week or two. For the past 1.5 weeks we (myself, my wife, her mom, and 4 of our 5 kids) have been on a family road trip, Seattle to Southern California and back.

Here’s the executive summary of our trip:

• June 14 – Leave Seattle, drive 600 miles to Redding, California.
• June 15 – Drive 450 miles to Bakersfield, California. Stop in Sacramento and tour the State Capitol.
• June 16 – Drive 40 miles to Tehachapi and pick up our daughter at gymnastics camp. Continue on to Anaheim, 150 more miles.
• June 17 -Tour Hollywood and Rodeo Drive.
• June 18 – Visit Disneyland.
• June 19 – Relax a bit; shop at Downtown Disney.
• June 20 – Drive 270 miles to the Hearst Castle, take the tour, stay in Morro Bay.
• June 21 – Drive 250 miles to South San Francisco, with stops in Gilroy, Silicon Valley, Stanford, and Palo Alto.
• June 22 – Tour San Francisco, including Pier 39, Fishermen’s Wharf, Ghirardelli Square, Lombard Street, Chinatown, and Haight-Ashbury.
• June 23 – Drive 865 miles to Seattle, brief stops in Berkeley and at Rudy’s Can’t Fail Cafe.

All in all we drove about 3000 miles in 10 days. We had a really good time and I hope we created some lasting memories.

I will blog a more detailed recap of our trip, for those who simply must know every last detail, and I will post some pictures as soon as I have the time to get them off of the camera.

We used a GPS receiver connected to a laptop for navigation (via Microsoft Streets and Trips) and it worked pretty well. I’ll write more about this in the coming week.

I reserved mid-range hotels for each night, being careful to select only those that offered “high speed internet.” I was not disappointed once — I was always able to get a reasonably strong WiFi signal and had no real problems connecting.