Last night we went to Santana Row to watch the Christmas lights in the area being switched on 🙂

Seems really early but apparently the week before thanksgiving is the tradition for this place.

Lots of music, dancing and excitement.

Typically Elly was happy just sat in the pushchair with an iPhone and Olly just wanted to be on his feet and in the crowd 🙂

Believe it or not, it has been nearly 30degrees Celsius today….

Apparently, it is going to be this way for three more days this week, before cooling off to under 20 degrees just in time for Grandma and Granddad arriving on Friday. Typical 🙁

Looking forward to a week off and to experiencing our very first Thanksgiving 🙂

The weeks are rapidly passing us by, however, finally the Christmas stuff has appeared in the shops.  We were out today on Santana Row, and noted that the Christmas Trees and other festive lights etc appear to be up in the streets outside the shops.  Even some of the shops are sporting Christmas attire 🙂

We went up to Muir Woods yesterday (north of the Golden gate bridge) to see the redwood trees – apparently some are 3000 years old.  In fairness it was a nice walk through the trees since the paths were either tarmac OR fully decked out to make the whole experience just easy. There was pain in parking the car – we had to park about 1.5 miles away and walk to the center, but it was a nice day, so no drama.

Simon has one more week of work and then has a week off – yay !  AND Grandma and Granddad are coming to stay for a couple of weeks.

Daddy was away in New York all week last week, so it is nice to be back and looking forward to a week holiday.

You  guessed it – it is raining today 🙁

Kerry has come back for another two weeks holiday / stress with the Rusts 🙂  Mummy and Kerrie have ventured out to the shops leaving the boys behind to play in the house – yay !  We are under reasonably strict (and fair) orders to NOT go to the toy shop today.

Simon is heading to New York later for 5 days so we are making the most of the day today.

The clocks finally went back here in the US so we are all back to 8 hours behind the UK folks (we were 7 hours for the last week since the UK clocks went back on the 31st October.

We all travelled down to Monterey Bay yesterday (south of Santa Cruz on the coast) to visit the Aquarium – nearly everybody we have spoken to has told us it is a great place to go.  We are not quite as positive as all – while it was nice, it was definitely pumped up to be much more that we saw yesterday – but then the day out was nice all the same 🙂

All the street corners that were Pumpkin Patches last week are in the midst of transformation to be Christmas corners 🙂  Quite incredible how quickly some of them are moving on ….

We went out Trick or Treating in Los Gatos tonight – the boys costumes were….

“Mickey” got literally hundreds (not kidding on the number – see later for details of why this is not an exaggeration) of comments as we walked the streets in Los Gatos – he loved being somewhat the center of attention and just wanted to run around in amongst it all :-).

We went with the Folks, and have been absolutely AMAZEAs by not only the amount of work that most of the residents in the streets that we visited had put in to decorate their homes for the night, but also the sheer number of people who visited.  We estimate that there were possibly more than 10,000 people out and about.  Kind of beats the 30 or 40 that we see when Trick or Treating on Turner Close etc….

T a ridiculous example, there were two or three houses that actually had their own OUTDOOR DJ’s sorting out the tunes for the people who were visiting !!!

This was genuinely something that you had to see to believe and unfortunately our photographs do not so it justice – it was dark after all.

Clare – while we were out tonight, V was thinking of you…