The wedding was fantastic, the San Diego temple is amazing.  So amazing that I didn’t even take one picture of it.  I took my tripod and everything to get some sweet pictures and ended up with nothing.  We did take a lot of other pictures though.

We went to Sea World and it was a very proud moment for me as Griff finally learned to keep his sweet Cubs hat I bought him on his head.

He loved his Cubs hat so much that he decided it was a good idea to try and feed it to the sea lions.  I’m assuming he saw the giant pool of water and threw the his hat in the same way you throw coins into a fountain and wished that Cubs would win a World Series.  He’s so thoughtful, thanks Griff.  I promise my first thoughts after seeing him was concern for the animals (not the hat), that they wouldn’t eat and choke on it.  Molly doesn’t believe me for some reason.  Luckily they were able to retrieve the hat and after washing it a few times is as good as new.

Although, Griff may have been angry at fish in general from an incident that happened shortly before the hat toss.  When I reached him down so he could pet a Dolphin, the dolphin let out a very loud and odd sounding noise from his blow hole.  Griff didn’t like this so much and didn’t want anything to do with it after that.    (Yes, the picture below was taken at the exact moment this unfortunate event happened)

We also went to the USS Midway, a decommissioned Aircraft Carrier that is now a museum.  I’ve done this before but I am more amazed each time I see this thing.  Whoever figured how to build something this large and make it float has to be one of the smartest men ever.  When these things are deployed, they have over 200 cooks on the ship.  200!  That’s nuts.

Griffin loved this one because he could climb into the cockpits of the planes and push buttons and he saw some helicopters, which are his favorite, you can see him signing helicopter in the bottom right.

Thanks for the fun San Diego!  We may have to come visit again soon.  Griff will want to show Walker how to make sea lions happy.

After leaving the Queen city, I met Molly in the AZ.  The reason for the trip was to pick up a car to bring back to Chicago so Molly can always have a car with the baby.  Thanks Janet and Terry for the great deal on a fine automobile.  So early Friday morning, sitting pretty in our new SUV, we found ourselves right in the middle of New Mexico staring Texas and Oklahoma right in the face.   Having now made my way across the country by means of three different freeways (I-80, I-70, and I-40/44) I can’t decide which is more painful.  I think I’ll just leave it as a tie, it’s like deciding between a punch in the face or a kick in the throat, in the end I prefer to choose neither.

We got through most of the trip on the first day so we could spend Saturday afternoon in St. Louis and go to the Cardinals – D’back game.  As much as I dislike the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, there’s no denying that their stadium is top notch, I was very impressed.  Nothing will ever beat a game at an old stadium like Wrigley or Fenway, but for a new stadium, the Cardinals know how to do it.  Having watched my first Harry Potter movie with Molly and Terry earlier in the week, I channeled my best inner Hogwarts to put a hex on the stadium.  And, based on the fact that Cubs have been playing horribly and dropped way out of first, I think it may have backfired.  I guess I need to read the books.  Here are a couple of pictures from the trip, more can be found under the Photos tab, here.

But the highlight of the trip was being able to go to the Boston temple with all of the Turk family.

A special shout out goes to Ma$e & Ashley and Nic & Holly for being our tour guides and chauffers. Shout out.