Tim has invested a lot of time in researching Specialized, YETI, Santa Cruz and Trek mountain bikes over the weekend and on Monday ordered the Yeti 575 bike.  It is being courier shipped from Colorado from Monday afternoon / Tuesday morning, and the local shop – Trail Head Cyclery are building it up for him.  Excited does not cover the Tim’s mood right now… 🙂

So, today we all head out to San Francisco at 8am, with Tim running over the Golden Gate Bridge first thing, then running up and around (down) Lombard street – the world’s crookedest road.  Then, Mum, Nard and Tim all head out on the boat from pier 33 to Alcatraz.

While they visited the rock, we went into San Francisco  and Vicky bought her first pair of Christian Louboutin shoes – they are very nice and hopefully pave the way for Simon to buy a Santa Cruz mountain bike 😉

We are finishing the day with Krispy Kreme doughnuts and a few sausages on the grill and beer 🙂

Not sure what we are doing tomorrow yet, except Mum is going to school to help with Vicky in the afternoon.  Friday is the big 2nd birthday, so we are heading to the beach…..

We all hope you have a wonderful 5th birthday big guy.  We are sorry that we can’t share it with you.

Today, Simon took his new IWC back to the shop for the rattle that has begun to occur within it, to be repaired.  The folks in the store were definitely not sure that there is a problem, but have sent it back to be checked all the same. Apparently this is going to take between 6 and 8 weeks 🙁

Vicky has taken one of her diamond rings in to have one of the diamonds reset (it fell out when she dropped it in the UK).  It will take a few days to fix up also 🙁

Tim has been checking out mountain bikes today – just hoping he makes a decision swiftly as the longer it takes, the more likely it is that Simon will feel the need to purchase…..

Great couple of weeks with the family in the UK, but we are now back in the bay.

2 mega birthdays – Rebecca’s 16th and Sue’s 21st.

The flight back today was really hard work – Oliver was not happy for over two hours of the journey 🙁 He finally fell asleep in daddy’s arms 40 minutes before we landed, then Elly fell asleep as the landing gear was falling out of the plane….  Ended up with 2 mega grumpy boys to get through a horrifically LOOOOOONNNNNNNNGGG security queue.  Thankully one of the security people spotted us and ushered us to the front of the queue.

So, one pap johns pizza, a couple of beers and we are all heading to bed – it is 21:33.

Simon is hoping to get a good nights sleep as he is up at 05:45 to get into work tomorrow…. Wish him luck….

We got back in the UK yesterday but due to traffic on the motorways we did not get back to Yorkshire until after 8pm.  We stopped by ForkHall to take a look through the windows – all looked good from what we could see (was almost dark).

We spent a large amount of today back in the house, and the deckit man has done a great job and the house actually feels almost brand new inside.  There is still a lot to do however – we have taken much of the kitchen stuff out of the shed and begun to get them cleaned in readiness for uncle Tim.  We have also got much of the garage stuff out and placed in the garage again.

Tim is bringing his bed, gardening gear (we don’t have mowers etc) and we nipped out tonight and bought a new suite for the lounge.  We hope Tim likes it, although are pretty sure he will – the bonus is that it is getting delivered next week, so when he gets back from California, he will have bed, couch, TV and therefore will be good to go.

Elly and Olly have LOVED playing in the garden today – just goes to show that we really need to search for a pad in CA that has a garden – even if we don’t end up buying out there, we really need to move from the current pad in September.

p.s. Elliot did great on the flight back here, and Olly did OK. We tried to upgrade the seats before we got on but no such luck 🙁 Perhaps on the way back to CA….

Elliot is really REALLY excited to be coming back to see everyone.  We are back for two weeks to get ForkHall ship shape for Uncle Tim to move in with Pepsi and Max next week.

We will be back in Yorkshire by early evening on Friday.