NEW PICS!

I finally uploaded the pictures from the remainder of our trip to Cali onto Picasa. Please look at them--I've edited the captions. And, I still plan to blog about how the trip was when I get a chance.

I also uploaded pictures of this weekend to the same place. No captions yet, but soon. Maybe I'll get to it tonight...

This weekend started out with a simple camping trip on Sunday night. My friend Casey lives in Riverside, CA (about 7 hours from us) and we decided to meet halfway to go camping. He could only get the campsite for one night, so we had to figure out what to do for the rest of the weekend. So, this is what we did:

1. Monterrey, CA
2. Fremont Peak State Park, camping on a mountain
3. Drive down the coast to San Simeon State Park
4. Viewed the Elephant Seals
5. Camped at San Simeon
6. Stopped by Hearst Castle (but didn't go in--too expensive)
7. Capitola, CA
8. Santa Cruz, CA
9. Got stuck in traffic that literally took us 1.5 hours to go 5 miles! I could have walked it in that period of time!

It was fantastic! Tons of fun and great to see Casey. We did some great hiking and saw some beautiful beaches. But I never, ever want to relive traffic like that. It was truly traumatizing. A combination of too many people going the same direction and 2 (yes, 2) accidents. It was bottlenecked so badly that just when we were ready to cut our losses and try to take an alternate route, we passed the accident and got through to high speeds. There's really only one road from Santa Cruz to San Jose, so, the "alternate" route would have taken us way out of our way. But we figured the traffic might actually take us longer. Fortunately, God came through for us, as always and cleared the path.

Hallelujah!