Monthly Archives: February 2016

Chicago 2011

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Here’s a retro treat: pictures from our 2011 trip to Chicago. On this visit, we took the kids up to Necedah, where my grandfather used to have a house on a bend in the Yellow River, and where my maternal grandparents are buried. It was my first trip up there in years, and the first ever for Julia and Joe.

My memory is a bit fuzzy—it was nearly five years ago, after all—but I seem to recall that the kids handled the long car ride pretty well, though we broke up the trip a bit by staying overnight at a motel in the Wisconsin Dells, where everyone could relax and swim. Julia enjoyed sliding down the little waterslide at the pool, but Joe was a bit more fearful, choosing instead to dog paddle alongside Julie the whole time.

While we were there, we took a boat tour on the Wisconsin river to see the Dells itself, a gorge containing cliffs and rock formations carved out of sandstone when Glacial Lake Wisconsin drained. Many of the rock formations had names, some of which I was even able to recall with the help of Google.

Gallery: Chicago 2011.

Spring and Summer 2015

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It’s Super Bowl Sunday here in the Bay Area, and rather than fight the insane traffic it’s causing, I decided to stay in and post pictures. Actually, because we’re so far behind, posting an album is on my to-do list pretty much every weekend, but circumstances often get in the way.

This set of pictures is relatively recent, dating back to the Spring and Summer of 2015. It covers Easter (William’s first as an active participant), the spring band concert at Booksin, Joe’s ninth birthday, Julia’s fifth grade promotion ceremony, and a trip to Great America with Angelisa, one of Julia’s friends from school, which Julia won for being one of the top sellers of Girl Scout cookies last February.

The promotion ceremony was brief but poignant. I don’t remember having anything of the kind when I finished elementary school, but I’m certain I would have enjoyed it. And, mercifully, it was much more temperate than the last graduation ceremony I attended, which was in Houston in May.

The trip to Great America was the first time we’d taken the kids to a proper amusement park, and despite some initial trepidation—especially from Joe—they had a great time. Julia and Angelisa were braver than I was at their age, hitting most of the roller coasters in the park that weren’t completely insane, while Joe’s enthusiasm was a bit more tempered by a healthy fear of perishing in a catastrophic failure of the park’s safety systems.

This was my first visit to the California version of Great America, as well (though I remember seeing it from our hotel or the highway during our family’s visit way back in 1982). Having been to the larger one in Illinois many times, it was strange to see a mix of familiar and unfamiliar sites. The two parks have been completely separate entities for years, but a number of rides, like the main carousel, log ride, bumper cars, and Sky Trek tower (called the Star Tower out here) are more or less identical. The vague sense of familiarity mixed with novelty made me feel at once young and old.

Gallery: Spring and Summer 2015.