Well, first off, we dropped the kids off on Thursday afternoon, meeting Chris's parents halfway to their house. It's a four hour drive total. We met at a McDonalds and the plan was to eat and let the kids play on the playground, but of course it was raining. One of the three days it rained this summer! We load up everything in Pop's car and move the car seats over. Then came the hard part, saying good-bye. The trick was to be sincere but not too sappy to where Matthew would get upset. Meaning I couldn't show how sad I really was, because I knew I would miss them. So I had to be tough. I did a good job because the kids left smiling and that was the important part.
We drive back to Austin. Now our plan was scheduled to leave at 7:40am on Friday morning. Instead of paying $25 a day to park at the airport, we park at the East Substatin, Chris's work. Seemed like a good secure place to park, within the large gates and surrounded by police cars. You can't beat that!
We wake up at 5:15 on Friday morning, get ready real quick, and drive to the East Sub. From there we walked a few blocks to a bus stop for the airport flyer, due at 6:28am. We cleverly packed everything in backpacks to make this easier.
As we are approaching the bus stop I realize I don't have any change for the bus and I wasn't sure if they took 20s. So Chris dashes across the street to a Sonic to get change. He ran back across the street just before the bus was pulling up. What a trooper! The bus gets us to the airport in ten minutes. Shocking. I know.
We go into the airport thinking, "yeah, we're here an hour early that should be fine this early in the morning." Then we see the lines to check in baggage. UHG! I was feeling panicky. An airport employee told us we had to go to a specific (and LONG) line to check in Chris's gun. It takes half an hour to get to the counter and it turns out we actually could have gone through any line. Grrr. So we pay for the bag and then fill out some paper work for Chris's gun. While there I nervously say, "We can make to the terminal by 7:40 right?" The lady then tells us the most amazing news, the flight was delayed by 35 minutes. Talk about relief. So we go over to where they really check the gun and then we were off to go to our terminal.
We wait in another line to take off our shoes and put everything through the x-ray machine. When we get out of that line it was 7:32am. If our flight had not been delayed we would have had eight minutes to get to the gate and board before it left. But luckily, we we're stressing any more.
We board on the plane. And arrive in sunny California where it was 74 degrees at 9:15am. Awesome weather! We collect our bags and hop on a shuttle bus to the Metro Rail. I was really impressed with the rails there. It took us an hour to get from the airport to Passadina, where Jon and Tina live. 
We meet up with Jon and Tina and then we were off to Chinatown! We had lunch at Foo Chow, which was used in the movie Rush Hour. You may have heard of it. But we weren't that impressed with their food. Then we walked around, taking tons of pictures of course. It seemed pretty empty. And I was expecting more outdoor vendors, but maybe it's different on the weekends. 
Then we headed back to get some groceries, because lucky me was getting cooking lessons from Jon, who buy the way is almost done with culinary school at the Le Courdon Blue. You know we're Emiril went. Yep. Jon's that good. :)He showed me how to make mac and cheese, the real way. I've tried twice and both times I ruined the sauce and we had to eat buttered elbow macaroni. And Chris said he wanted quiche, so I got to learn out to make that from scratch too. Both were actually pretty simple, I just learn cooking techniques better hands on. We had sooooooo much cheese though! It was great.
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