Each year, our daughter, Munchkin, has vacation the week after Easter Sunday. With such busy schedules, this week is often our biggest time of the year to spend time together, and we try to do something nice.

This year, we took a vacation in Southern California, lasting eight days. The first portion of our trip was in the San Gabriel Valley, near Pasadena.

We started with a nice dinner and visit with several cousins and a favorite aunt. We had an enjoyable reunion breakfast with a friend of Tepo's, whom she hadn't seen in thirty years. We visited Disney's California Adventure. We hiked at the Los Angeles County Arboretum. But the highlight of our LA visit, after meeting up with our aunt and cousins, was dinner at Clearman's Northwoods Inn, with WLD257 and JDSmiling.

The second portion of our trip was in and around San Diego. Our visit began at Balboa Park, where we purchased some passport tickets and visited several museums. We spent a day at Legoland. The highlight of our San Diego visit was a day spent with PCT Packer and Ms PCT, including visits to Point Loma and Cabrillo National Monument, and Mission Gorge and Mission Dam, in Mission Trails Regional Park.

Our ride home was a straight-through drive from San Diego to Sacramento, with a stop at the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve. Everything went great during the entire trip, but things fell apart, literally in the last mile. Just as we turned onto the street where we live, the transmission in our Toyota Sienna experienced what the dealer later called, "a catastrophic system failure."

The good thing was that this happened literally within walking distance of our house, instead of out in the Mojave Desert or along Interstate 5. The bad part was that this unexpected malfunction happened to a relatively young vehicle, with a spotless repair history and a manufacturer with a reputation for high quality.

Enough about that ... Presented here are 83 photos from our trip. You can view them in sequence as a slide show, or read the captions and make selections directly from an indexed list.

Photo Notes: The cameras used on this trip were our trusty old Samsung automatic 35mm, along with an Olympus D-380 digital camera. We hope you enjoy the pictures!

Best Regards,

The Farmer Family

ffarmer@frankandtepo.com