Days 3 & 4: Merry Xmas!

No Christmas is complete without some romantic pumpernickel, right?
Bob and Phyllis:
And finally, our stockings (and my dad):

Days 1 & 2: This Tree is Older Than Jesus

Sometimes days are surreal. Saturday was one of them. We awoke at 4:00 am in New York and by noon (local time) we were walking around the UC Santa Cruz campus with my dad (Bill), brother (Adron) and the family dog (Jascha).

I'm not sure what goes on at UCSC, but from our brief visit I can guess it probably involves a lot of drum circles, Tibetan prayer flags and Frisbee Golf. In any event, our next stop, Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, was full of mind-blowingly large Redwood tree goodness. It had been 6 years since I've seen a giant Redwood, and Lily had never seen one, so we wandered around the grove of ancient trees with our jaws dragging along the ground behind us. The park has a display of a cross-section of an old tree where someone went to the trouble of counting the rings, and they were so kind as to point out that the tree probably started growing around the time of the birth of Christ. This tree is bigger, which means it must be older than Jesus.
Sunday we took Adron with us for a trip to San Francisco. We started off driving across the Golden Gate Bridge and into the park on the other side, where we found a trail which takes you up to a sweeping view of the Bay Area.
Someone was nice enough to name the trail the "Slacker Trail", which is a total lie...it should have been the "Half-Mile Staircase Trail". After climbing and viewing we drove back into San Francisco, had lunch in the Marina and then walked all of the Upper Haight and part of Golden Gate Park.