Anniversary Weekend at Old Sacramento and a Hike on Donner CanyonTrail

Between last week and this we have been pretty busy.  




Last weekend, we spent our 16th wedding anniversary with the kids in Sacramento.  It was a pretty relaxing trip with a trip on the train, a visit to the train museum and just strolling Old Sacramento.  We had our anniversary dinner at Joe's Crab Shack.  

Since we have really cut back on these type of adventures, the kids had a wonderful time.  The highlight was the train museum. I thought I would have kids that loved museums as much as myself but they just ate it up.  The museum is awesome, with the focus on how the railroad transformed the United States into the the industrial powerhouse that it would become.  

Funny thing, it made me remember when I was a kid, maybe 4 or 5 - maybe younger, when my parents took us to a railroad restaurant in Redlands.  We didn't go there often, I believe it might have been pretty pricey.  However, I remember playing in the caboose.

One of two original gold spikes.

After the museum, we continued with the California state history lesson to visit Sutter's Fort.  This was actually Emma's choice.  Again, packed full of history, you quickly come to realize while Sutter was not a nice gent; however, his impact on the creation of the state prior to the discovery of gold was important.

It was a wonderful anniversary weekend,  the first one of these since loosing my job 2 years ago.

Today we had set aside to take the kids up to the Mount Diablo summit; however, there was a cycling race to the summit (the Diablo Challenge).  So we ended up hiking out of Mitchell Canyon.  We did a little exploring and were treated to a whole new side of the mountain to enjoy -Donner Canyon Trail.  This is a beautiful valley at the base of the mountain with oak forests along a creek.  Overall it was a 4.5 mile loop with gentle rolling hills.  When the rain comes, this will be a very beautiful area with waterfalls and emerald green hills.

It has been a nice couple of weeks.


By the way, this is the 100th blog post for this blog.  I have really enjoyed this outlet and look forward to more posts in the future.

Time to Do Some Catching Up....

Well time flies when your having fun and your computer crashes over two months ago.  Its funny on how you make do and realize what really you need a computer for and what is basically a waste of time.


Oh well, what has been sorely missing is the update of the rest of summer and the kids going back to school.  Emma is now in middle school and we have switched  Sophie and Myles to a elementary that is two blocks from the house!


We have been having a lot of fun, many changes, and working on repairing bridges.  

We had an awesome assembly:

Had some awesome time with the kids with Myles finally riding and loving riding his bike.  Emma ran her first half marathon (13.1 miles) and Sophie is a running fiend (just completed a solo 10K with over 2000 feet of elevation).

We also had excitement nearby.  Mount Diablo had the first fire since we moved here 14 years ago.  Since we live 2 miles from the park entrance, we had a sideline view.  The park opened back up last Monday and Beth took a run up there.  You can find her pictures here.  We went up today  and I took some more pictures.   The wonderful thing is that other than the grass, most of the stubs that make up the chaperell and manzanita are fire resistant which means that everything will come back next year!

Enjoy some other pictures of the summer: