The "Why" Behind Our California Adventure

The call came toward the beginning of July.
Dani, one of the girls I've known through youth group called to say she had no one to take her to college in Southern California. I had told her months before to let me know if she found herself headed out there alone and I'd see what I could do to make sure she didn't move across the country by herself.

I asked Steve what he thought and he gave the OK.
Within 2 weeks I had booked our flights.
Shortly after that our hotel room, rental car and of course contacted our local SoCal friends.

September 1st was our departure date and before I knew it Steve and I headed out to the west coast just a few hours before Dani.

As part of her graduation gift I told her we'd check some bags for her. Here is Steve with our portion of moving our "niece" to college, mind you she arrived with just about as much stuff.
After getting the rental car we checked into our hotel, unloaded our belongings and made the trek back to the airport to pick her up.

Somehow we managed to load up all her bags as well as bags from trip #1 to Wal-mart.

Then came Target. The coolest Target I've ever seen!!

The store was actually on the second story with a parking garage underneath it. As you went down in your escalator your cart went down in it's own escalator.

We then made our way to the campus and set out to find her dorm room!

It was fun to watch her walk and look for her room number...

Signs lined the halls welcoming the new students...

and then we found it!!

After dumping the first load, meeting her roommate and her parents, we headed back out for dinner and another Wal-mart stop. Taking a child to college is expensive, well at least for the parents and students- not so much for the Aunt and Uncle :)

 Somewhere along the line we made it to Target again :)

After unloading and folding and hanging clothes we managed to take a group photo.

Here is a tour of the Azusa Pacific University campus.
The baptism pool, rumor has it kids climb the trees to catch a peak.


Riding to the west side of the campus on the trolley system


Outside of the library with the San Angeles National Forest in the background.

The wailing wall.

Prayer chapel

There was a really neat hallway/exhibit area with really thought provoking and creative pieces of art; this one was perhaps my favorite. While beautiful is circled many other lies we tend to believe about ourselves are all over this crossword-- can you fin them? and if you believe any of them be reminded that you are beautiful.

So there it is the reason we made the trip to the west coast.
More to come, after all we travelled into the mountains behind Azusa, visited the Pacific Ocean, the high desert and of course Yosemite!!

More to come--