Trip to L.A.

This past weekend we decided to make use of our free airline tickets through Jon's work and take a family trip to L.A.! We flew out Friday afternoon and stayed in a motel that night. In the morning we loaded up our rental car and let Jonah do the driving...

But since he couldn't reach the pedals we thought he might enjoy the trip more from the backseat (notice the palm trees in the background).
We drove up Pacific Coast Highway 1 to Malibu Beach. On the way we stopped to watch some surfers. I couldn't believe how close they were to each other - collisions must happen all the time.
We found a fantastic campground up on a hill overlooking the beach.
Yes, that's right. We camped! This was very minimalist camping as we only had room in our luggage for a tent, sleeping bags and a lantern. No other camp gear whatsoever. I was a little jealous as we passed our fellow campers who were fully prepared with camp stoves, coolers, chairs, etc. But we had a great time despite our lack of camping "stuff". Good missionary training, right?
This is the view out our tent door. It's hard to tell in this picture, but the ocean is in the background.
Jonah enjoyed crawling around the tent.
The one thing we did have was the Pack n' Play for Jonah. He spent a lot of time chewing on the side of the crib and now in retrospect I realize why: Monday morning as we were packing up to leave I discovered (while trying to fish a piece of grass out of his mouth) that he had cut his first tooth!
It was an extremely hot weekend (in the 100's) and we had many sweaty moments. We found a state park and thought we might take a little hike so we loaded Jonah into the backpack and headed out. After about 50 yards we realized this was a bad idea and hastily made our way back to the air conditioned car. (Note the completely miserable look on Jonah's face.)


I was concerned that he was getting dehydrated with all the heat and sweating so I wanted to give him something to drink when we got back in the car. All I had was some sugary orange drink left in my cup from McDonald's. This video hardly does justice to how excited he was to have that juice!

Jonah's first trip to the Pacific.
He got a little too close to the water and had to lose his shorts as a result.

Of course we had to check out Hollywood and get our picture taken with Rambo.
As we were packing up to leave we saw the biggest, most disgusting bug we've ever seen. We were just glad we hadn't seen it earlier or we would have been totally paranoid about it getting in the tent. Any ideas what this might be?

Jonah did really great on the plane both ways. We were able to have an empty seat between us so he had a little extra room to play. (Southwest has a first-come first-served seating policy... apparently no one wanted to pick a seat next to an active 9-month-old.)