San Francisco Weekend: A Look at Our New Turf

This past weekend we drove up to the Bay Area to check out the different cities we could potentially move to and spend time with family. We arrived on Wednesday night, and were excited to see all the cousins had waited up for us... okay, okay... for Westin. 

Westin and Emery are at such a fun age. They had a blast playing with each other.

We spent most of Thursday looking around the East Bay. We started in Walnut Creek, then went over to Lafayette, Orinda, Moraga and Piedmont. We really liked the Walnut Creek/Lafayette area. We're trying to find something close to the BART, since Ryan will have to commute in to the city and we're trying to minimize that time as much as possible. We also ended up spending a couple hours on Saturday driving around Dublin, which we ended up also really liking. I think both areas could be home for us. So now it's a matter of mapping out schools, wards and then seeing what's available when we're ready to move.

On Friday, we drove into the city for some fun. We took Westin to Fisherman's Wharf to see the sea lions - which he loved!

Then we walked down to the Ferry building and Ryan's new office.

We grabbed lunch at Ryan's favorite sandwich place, Focaccia, which happens to be two blocks from his new office. He's pretty stoked about that.

After lunch, we walked to Ghirardelli Square where we satisfied our sweet tooth.

Back in Danville with the cousins, where W, Emery and Delaney decided to get some exercise in... these are situps.

We also spent afternoons outside riding scooters and playing at the park nearby.

And then W discovered the Nerf guns... and full attention for the remainder of the trip was focused on this activity.

Our last night there, we went to dinner with the gang and followed it up with frozen yogurt.

And before we left Sunday, we were able to watch General Conference. To help the kids listen to the talks, Jan had a great idea to pick about eight different words (e.g. faith, prayer, love, repent, etc.) and matched treats to each one. Every time the kids heard one of the words, they were able to pick one of the treats. They loved the idea and it worked pretty well.

Great weekend... went by too fast!