All Work and No Play.....

makes for a boring summer. Now that Nate and I are settled in the apartment we will be in for the next few months and both working full time, we decided to take advantage of where we are at and have some fun. This past weekend we went down to Santa Barbra, CA and met up with Nate's family who were there for vacation. Even though it was a short trip with LOTS of driving (7.5 hrs each way) it was worth it. Here is a glimpse of some of our fun times.
This is heading into the Sierra Mountains about 15 mins from out apartment


We made a few stops along the way to look at some of the cool mountain lakes that are all around up there.
This is at 8000 ft above sea level. Still plenty of snow.

Here is another one of the mt lakes. We past at least 5 or 6 and you could see more in the distance.


This is at 8000+ feet. What a view!!!

We knew we were in Northern CA when we started to see all of the vineyards.



This was the first glimpse of the beach as we got closer.

We stayed in a place called Solvang. It is a little tourist town where everything is a Norwegian theme. It was really pretty and fun to see all the building and little shops.

There were windmills of all sizes all over.

This was a really cool thing we saw in the window of a shop. It is a wood carving of a coat and hat hanging up. At first glance you thought it was real, but then you noticed it was fake.

This is my sister -in-law Melissa and her friend Brittany.

On Sat afternoon we rented a some bikes and peddled our way around. This is called a Suri Bike. They had them down in Fl where I worked and they are a lot of fun, because you can fit a lot of people in them.Nate and I decided to try out one of the tandem bikes.

This picture contains 3 of Nate's favorite things. Ice Cream, cars, and me. (Not in that order of course!!)

Later that afternoon we hiked up to see some waterfalls in the area.

Then we headed to THE BEACH!!!!! This is the beach in Santa Barbra that we went to and spent sometime just playing in the sand and enjoying the sunset.

We know it's cheesy, but we had fun writing stuff in the sand.


We had so much fun playing and watching the sail boats come and go.


There were tons of pelicans there. It was dinner time and it was fun to watch them dive in and catch their food over and over. We had a great trip, but now it's back to work.