West Coast Visit--San Francisco, the Redwoods, and Oregon Vortex

 Kent and I flew out to San Francisco on the morning of Saturday, June 29th.  Russ, Adri and Sophia picked us up at the airport and took us to China Beach, which is one of the places to get a good view of the Golden Gate Bridge.  We don't seem to have any pictures of us with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, since we used Russ and Adri's camera to take those pictures.  There's a picture of all of us together on Adri's blog.

We went to Fisherman's wharf  the next day after church.

We didn't go out to Alcatraz, but we saw it out in the bay.  This is how far away it was.

I used the zoom on our camera and was able to get this amazingly close-up shot.  

 I like this photo with the American flags and two San Francisco landmarks, the Coit Tower and the Transamerica pyramid.

 We read in the guide books that the shot below is one of the most photographed in San Francisco, so we drove up an extremely steep hill to get to the park where this picture was taken.

 On Monday we drove out to Russ's office to have lunch with him at Chevron.  It was a very nice place.

 That evening we went to the grounds of the Oakland Temple.  Again the pictures of Kent and me are on the Lee's camera, so no pictures of us at the temple.

 The next day Kent and I and Adri and Sophia started driving north to get to Oregon for our family reunion.  Along the way we stopped to see the redwood forest.

 Kent couldn't pass up the chance to peek from behind such a massive tree.  (You can see him peeking from behind a cherry blossom tree in the blog post from 21 May this year.)

 Sophia did very well for having to spend so much time in her car seat.  Her reward was swimming in the hotel pool that evening.

Sophia did a great job of hanging on to her floaty and LOVED playing in the water.
This is Mount Shasta in northern California, which we saw for several miles as we drove along the freeway.

 Not too far into Oregon near Medford we went to the Oregon Vortex, which we'd learned about on an AFN commercial when we lived in Germany.

They claim that there are so many magnetic deposits in the area that strange things happen, like balls appearing to roll up hill.  We spent a couple of hours there.

 Lots more pictures to come of our visit to family in Vancouver, WA, and Hillsboro, OR, but I'll put those in another post.