More visits

Thursday morning we slept in a little, finished drying clothes, packed up and drove to our next hotel in San Mateo. After stopping by the Post Office to mail some more stuff home, we relaxed for awhile and then made our way to Santa Clara to have dinner with our niece Ellie. We gave ourselves 45 minutes to make the drive and it took over an hour with all of the major traffic. That is one thing I am definitely not used to, after living in Unalaska for almost seven years. It nearly freaks me out any more to be stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. :)

Ellie is the middle daughter of my brother Joe and his wife Denise, who live in Jackson, Wyoming. We were trying to remember when we last saw Ellie and decided it must have been the summer I moved to AK so she was still pretty young. Luckily for us, Facebook keeps us in touch! She's a freshman at Santa Clara University and a great soccer player for the university's women's team. She and her sisters are all fantastic soccer players--her older sister Nicole plays for the University of Wyoming and her younger sister Brooke has signed to join Ellie at Santa Clara next year.
We went out to dinner at a nice little Italian place downtown and had a lot of fun catching up, laughing and telling stories. I was so glad she was willing to take the time to hang out with her old aunt and uncle. :) I found out my brother is going to be there next week--too bad we couldn't have coordinated our trips somehow but he's coming in for her first spring game. Maybe in the future we will be in the area at the same time. I'd love to see the girls play, too. We'll all be in Jersey this summer so are looking forward to that.

After dinner, we drove to Los Altos to stop in on my ex's cousin Susan and her partner Kris, whom I've stayed in touch with over the years and have seen once before when we were in San Francisco. I'd emailed them before we left AK but we didn't manage to touch base till the last minute. It wasn't ideal but the best we could do was barge in on them at 10 PM and visit for an hour or so! I had never met their daughters and got to say hi to the oldest, Erin, before she went to bed but the younger, Loren, was already asleep. Next time we will plan better!


Susan and Kris are so much fun and we had a great time hanging out, even if it was short. I feel like we barely scratched the surface of all the things we had to discuss!

After our visits, we spent the night in San Mateo and then drove back to San Francisco to return our rental car and get ready to go home.