California-Part 1

This was a random donkey we saw right as we were heading down. How random is that, just a van with a donkey in it???

Ryan served his mission in California and there was another expo we wanted to go to for work so the day after Alli's birthday we headed down that way. We stayed in Vegas with some family (one of my mom's cousins) Thursday night. It was fun visiting them and catching up, it's been a while since I've seen them. They have an English Bulldog (Ryan's favorite dog breed) and Alli loved playing with it! We all went down to have dinner on the strip. Sometime I want to go back down, there is so much to do down there, so many cool displays in the hotels, and amazing shopping! After we ate we drove down one street where they do movie/shows on the "ceiling".


We headed out early the next morning so we could be in Anaheim by 9:30 to get set for the expo so we went and got registered and after seeing how many vendors were there we decided that I would also go talk to people as well (awesome, I know-I was excited about all the fun stuff to take Alli and do, but it ended up being worth it). We met up with one of the suppliers for lunch at the Cheesecake Factory in downtown Anaheim and then Ryan went on a tour of the plant while Alli and I hung out at a cool little strip mall by the restaurant. It had a bunch of little waterfalls and some fun shops so we were plenty entertained!

We were walking up to the convention center and Ryan was pretty impressed with the line up of cars-this was pretty typical of the whole weekend, there were soo many incredible nice cars everywhere it seemed!

Friday night we were all exhausted after walking around and looking at the booths so we went to our hotel in Irvine (a total score, we got it online for 50.00 for hotel that is 2-300.00 per night!). Got some dinner at a Japanese place closeby and crashed at our hotel.
Saturday morning right after we started "working" Ryan called me to tell me that he'd just seen my "favorite" actor-Jim Carrey (he's probably one of my least faves actually) with his bodyguards walking through the expo. Kind of cool.

Saturday afternoon we had to take a break. We had learned our lesson with Alli on Friday-her naps need a little more priority! She did really well walking around the expo, but everyone has their limits and she reached hers (I think we all reached ours!). So we headed to the beach Saturday afternoon so she could nap when we came back and walked through the expo-it worked out much better. So we headed to Corona Del Mar-beautiful!!! When I "grow up" I want a house on that beach!





We drove past the Newport Beach temple on our way back to the convention center. They were building it while Ryan was on his mission, but he came home before it was completed so he hadn't seen it. It is a unique, but beautiful temple!

Then we went back to work to finish it all up. Ryan and I would each take a section, it was actually pretty fun-even more fun when I was working without a little helper :). My favorite little helper decided she was done after a couple more hours and she played in a VW bus converted to a play area for kids. After a bit I wanted to talk to 1-2 more companies so I took her from that, she wasn't super happy, but when the lady offered her a sample of chocolate milk she was okay. Well about half way through her sample she got bumped or something and spilled the rest all down my white capris-awesome! So we went and got the keys from Ryan and waited til he was done with his section and finishing my section since I now looked soo professional in chocolate milk splotched capris-she did a fabulous job covering me! I had another pair of pants in the car so I could change which was good because we met up with a family from Ryan's mission at Red Robin for dinner. Then we drove through some of his areas to see if people still lived in their same houses and meet people. It was so fun meeting the people he worked with and knew. He was such an excellent missionary and I'd known that all along, but hearing him talk to people and hearing what they had to say about him was really neat. Apparently he's become sort of a legend in the mission because of how he worked. I'm certainly glad it was not the other way around-I think I would have been slightly disappointed to only hear stories of how he just played the whole time etc etc. Anyway-a little tangent there, but it was cool to see him in his "element" even though it's been almost 6 years since he's been back.