California Road Trip: “No Embarcadero!”

(This is Part 5 of our California Road Trip Blog. My daughter and I are taking turns posting, this time she has the honors) – photos and text by Kaia Calhoun – It seems against the rules to come all the way to San Francisco and not see the Golden Gate Bridge. We were scheduled to leave for Los Angeles the next day and I hadn’t seen a spec of downtown San Francisco.  So, mom go to work on getting us our rental car sooner so we could drive into the city for the afternoon. We spent the morning at my second cousin, Jensen’s, swim meet and making phone calls.  […]

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California Road Trip – “Crazy Busy”

– photos by Kaia Calhoun For much of our recent vacation, my daughter and I stayed with my niece Dena and her wonderful family. Their beautiful home is situated amidst the heavily wooded, narrow twisting lanes of a Bay Area paradise.  What a great place to grow up; no mosquitoes or blizzards there! Dena’s life as a mother is crazy busy. From dawn until dusk she is running her two kids, Jensen (7) and Boden (4), to one activity or another—swimming, tennis, ballet, play dates, or day camp to name a few—yet she still manages to make nutritious home-cooked meals and teach Pilates. The whole business was a little overwhelming […]

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California Road Trip – “High Horses”

– Photos by Kaia Calhoun Philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.” A sucker for longevity, I have always taken his advice to heart. Of course, the problem with always playing it safe is that life can become a little predictable. On this vacation I vowed to step outside my comfort zone and make some extra-special memories.  So rather than doing a conventional Sonoma County wine tasting and bouncing from winery to winery tasting different vintages, Kaia and I experienced a vineyard in a […]

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California – Day 1 (July 19)

My daughter Kaia and I are taking a vacation in California to celebrate her graduation from college. For the next week or so we will be taking turns blogging about our adventures.  She is a professional photographer, so the shots you are going to see will be incredible!  The first post was written by her… enjoy! July 21, 2011 by Kaia Calhoun Yesterday I woke up to the wet blanket of humidity.  It made a habit of looming on top of Minnesota for a few days already, but nothing like yesterday.  By the end of the day I heard that the temperature peaked at 95 degrees, but with the humidity […]

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