Month: July 2014

After a disastrous night in the sauna hotel room, we drove to Grandpa’s for breakfast.

After some scrambled eggs and bacon, I looked through the photo albums with Grandpa and picked out a few to bring home. Here are two of my favorites.

My grandparents in 1949

 My grandmother in 1972

We climbed back into the (air conditioned) car and headed off to Flagstaff.

Some of the areas that we drove through were empty!

Once we got to Flagstaff and unloaded the car, we headed off to dinner. Uncle Paul lived here and gave us some recommendations:

• beer
• tattoos
• breakfast place

I felt pretty comfortable checking one of those items off the list, and of course we hadn’t gotten to breakfast yet. So instead we went to Diabalo Burgers, which Paul and a dog friendly website both recommended.

There was a cool cat statue outside, and Jonah and Owen got to try one of Uncle Paul’s recommendations. Cheers!

The day after Sea World we needed to be out of the hotel room by noon, but couldn’t meet my grandfather until 5 or so, so we needed to kill some time. We stayed at the room as long as possible in order to do laundry and pack the car, but got to the beach in time for a picnic (although on second thought, bringing ham sandwiches and chips to a dog park was maybe not the smartest thing to do). Even though it was a Monday, around 11 am, it was much more crowded than the previous day.

The boys went out into the waves (a little too deep, even) and Kate dug a lot of holes.

Then the boys dug some holes too.

At this point, Penelope was a little confused and shifted into herding mode; she kept going from Kate to Jonah to Owen. “But they’re not together! They must be contained!” I could almost hear her saying.

After the beach we drove to Palm Springs and picked up Great Grandpa for dinner. We went to Manhattan in the Desert, which is one of my favorite restaurants ever. Unfortunately the hotel was not a hit. I think the air conditioning in the room was broken, and we tossed and turned all night long. We even tried to leave the window open for more air, which gives you an idea of just how hot it was. Ugh.