I Love You, California!

Today begins my two and a half week tour of the Midwest! I'll be visiting my sister, parents, and friends, attending weddings, and relaxing after some stressful days ending my time at work and getting ready for our big move to Hawaii. I arrived in to Chicago this evening and my sister graciously picked me up from Midway airport. Here we are cruising down Lake Shore Drive! (Don't worry, I took the picture and my sister was kind of stopped . . .)

It's my favorite Sunday event, ever! And this time we had the pleasure to be joined by Katie, Paola, Joe, Bomber, and Hugo! It was a beautiful day as always and we enjoyed a growler of beer from yesterday's Lagunita's trip, some vino, sandwiches, pizza from a truck, and most importantly good company.

We are going to be in Minneapolis for Will's birthday so I thought it would be fun to do a little early birthday celebration with Katie and Alex in the Bay! We know that we'll be back in Oakland after our time in Hawaii, but I still felt like we needed to check some things off our list that we hadn't yet done. Our day began with a mini road trip to the North side of the Golden Gate Bridge to Mt. Tamalpais. It's 2,571 feet at it's peak and the hike up takes many hours. Instead of doing such a long hike, we drove up to the summit and went on more of a nature walk than a hike around the summit. It was a pretty clear day so we had some beautiful 360 views of the Bay. After our "hike" it was time for our second destination - Lagunitas Brewery! A couple weeks ago when we hiked Alamere Falls we really wanted to get to Lagunitas in Petaluma, but it was pretty late in the day and Petaluma was another hour and a half away. So tod...

Will has been working so extremely hard to get the Hawaii project up and running. Things have finally been finalized with the grant his company won, so Will was able to give the green light to his farmer to start getting the land cleared and prepped to plant. There is a lot of work to be done so the land likely won't be ready for planting until the beginning of October, but at least the work is officially underway as of today! The tractor clearing the land!