California

As some of you know I used to live in California.

My whole childhood was there.

We moved the summer I turned 12 to Utah.

I know that I am a complete Utah girl 100% but there is a part of me that feels like I am home the moment I cross that boarder.

Mark and I have been to California once together which was three months after we were married.

We visited my brother, Ben and his family in San Diago and got to go to Disney Land.

We also headed up north to Sacramento to visit my beloved Grandma Horn, my mom's mom.

My grandma is one of the best people I know.

Well I wrote earlier that my sweet Grandma past away in October of 2012.

She told the family that she didn't want a funeral if she died before my cousins wedding.

She past about a week before.

So we decided as a family to have a memorial for her in the spring.

All my siblings made arrangements to be there.

Another reason we wanted to all get over there was for my brother Josh.

Josh has for many years now been inactive in church.

We have all prayed for him and even fasted for him.

For some reason I was never too worried about him.

I think somehow I knew deep down all would work out, in this life or the next.

I knew my Father in Heaven was watching out for him.

Well Josh moved to California about a year ago and I know my mom worried that he would never find his way back to the church.

But I still didn't worry.

Well somehow the Lord found Josh and was able to soften his heart.

Josh told us in February that he was getting ready to go to the temple again.

When my mom told me I wept like a baby.

I had been praying for my brother and although I knew it would work out I wasn't prepared for this to happen.

I didn't care when it was but I would be going out there to go with him.

We arranged his going through the temple to be the same weekend as my grandmothers memorial.

Not just these two things drew the Ellis family to California.

We had been planning a National Park trip out to California for about a year.

We had scheduled the trip 6 months earlier.

The memorial was planned to be a week earlier then we planned our trip but we were able to move it up a week luckily so we could save a bit of money to make one great big trip instead of two.

It was an amazing trip with way too many highlights to put in one post so the next few posts are about our amazing trip.

Mark loves to get pictures of the road while driving and Nevada has some of the best roads to drive on.

Wait, no they don't, they suck!

Mark fell asleep and was even snoring, then Scott fell asleep.

Since the road is so long and completely strait I took some pictures while driving.

I know I'm horrible but really it was fine.