Deserts, Mountains, Pleasanton

Pleasanton—my favorite place; 410 miles of I-80 in the Nevada desert, not so much. The trees in the Sierra Nevadas are beautiful, too. The kids were getting cranky so, to distract them, I asked them to see if they could tell which trees telephone poles are made out of. Joy said, “How can you tell? Do they have telephones on the side of them?” I thought she was joking until I remembered she’s from the cell-phone tower generation.

The drop in elevation out of the Sierras is pretty steep in relatively few miles and this is how the conversation went when we got down on the California side:
Sam: Mom, why is it so quiet all of a sudden?
Me: Maybe your ears are plugged. Swallow.
Sam: What?
Me: (louder) Maybe your ears are plugged. Swallow.
Sam: (very loudly) WHAT?
Me: (muttering under my breath but smiling) I give up. I’m right but he’ll never know it.

For 13 hours, Sam asked every 15 minutes how much longer or how many more miles to Grandpa’s house. Okay, I exaggerate a little. Really, he only asked about 3 times per hour. At one point, I answered, “Well, it’s only been 15 minutes since the last time you asked so the answer isn’t really different.” And he laughed like he was a little embarrassed. But he still couldn’t help but keep asking.

This morning, I jogged around the park on Black Avenue a couple of times, Joy and I collected a few seeds from Gpa’s flower garden and now we’re going to take BART to San Francisco and take the kids sightseeing.