Our trip to Sacramento

At around 5:30 in the morning on Monday, my Dad came into our room and woke us up.  We had everything for the trip prepared the night before, but we hadn't loaded everything into the car. There were also some food in the refrigerator that we needed to bring and many last-minute things we needed to do (like waking up my brother so he could prepare his things).

 Around 6:00, we left the house.  In almost no time, the sun was up.

Outside the window, the land was parched and dry, but the view was nice.

The six of us were not the only ones traveling.  My younger siblings' stuffed animals were also riding on the car.

About half-way through the trip, we stopped at a rest station.  We had stopped at this rest station before last year when we went on our road trip.

There was plenty of space to run around before we went back into the car.  Many birds were there, too.  My brother had fund taking pictures of the birds and their nests. The bird pictures that you see are taken by him.

Here are some birds on the sidewalk near the parking lot.

This is a bird and a nest.  There were also many nests on the roof, and this is one of them.

After playing a few running games with my siblings, we got back into the car and started driving again.

On the way, we passed a place with lots of cows.  Along the road, we also saw other cows, but we never saw so many cows all in one place.

By this time it was almost 10, and we had been in the car for many hours already. I was getting bored.

I didn't feel like d memorizing my verses, so I decided to play with a puzzle ball.  I took it apart and then put it back together again.  It was easy to put it together and take it apart, but it wasn't easy to find out how to do it.  After that, I tried to play a game (the one in the picture) I saw my brother play when he was on the car last time.  It was actually quite fun.

After a few more hours, we arrived at San Francisco. This is the San Francisco Bay.

When we were in San Francisco, we went on this bridge. When I first saw it, I thought it was the Golden Gate Bridge with its paint peeled off.  Of course, it wasn't.  But we would see the Golden Gate Bridge later.  When my brother heard that we were going to the Golden Gate, he said that he thought that the Golden Gate was in Israel.  He was right.  The person who said we were going to the Golden Gate Bridge accidentally omitted the word 'bridge'.  So the Golden Gate was in Israel, but the Golden Gate Bridge was in San Francisco.

After seeing the slanted roads and heavy traffic in San Francisco, I wondered how people were able to drive here.  It definitely took lots of risk, courage, and skill.

On the way to the Golden Gate we passed by a cemetery.

We also saw a small 'car'.

At first, we wanted to drive all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge, but there was too much traffic, so we parked in a space about 10 minutes away from the Golden Gate Bridge.

This is the Golden Gate Bridge from a distance.  It was foggy and there was a lot of wind that day.

This is how it looks like underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

We walked up a path to a higher spot and there we could see the Golden Gate Bridge a lot better.

Near the Golden Gate Bridge, there was an area where we could learn more about the Golden Gate Bridge.

This is my brother learning about the Golden Gate Bridge and how it needs to be able to resist strong winds.

There were many others.  We learned about the Golden Gate Bridge's construction, builders, engineers, and more.

We had a limited time for our parking space, so we hurried back to the car.  Today, we would also be meeting a friend. However, since the next day would be the fourth of July, the traffic was very heavy. To cross every traffic light, it took at least fifteen minutes, and after that we would be stuck on a steep road waiting for the next green light.  It was only supposed to take about fifteen minutes to get to the restaurant where we would meet with our friends, but we didn't arrive at the restaurant until 6:30 pm.  The restaurant was called Fog Harbor and the table cloth was made of paper and there were crayons for you to use.  So before we left the restaurant, I wrote a thank-you note to our waitress and drew a picture.

We said good-bye to our friends and drove one and a half hours to Sacramento, where we would be attending the Family Conference.  We arrived at our hotel room at about 10pm.