Shout out to Santa Cruz!

Well last weekend the fam headed down to one of our favorite places, the city we met in, Santa Cruz.

Ahh..when we were young.

My dear little cousin (not that little I guess) got married, (we need a good excuse to get out if town these days! We had not been back since we left). 

Beautiful Allie<3

It was a beautiful ceremony full of love and joy. My Uncle (her dad) gave a lovely speech, yeah I teared up a bit, and we got to see family that we had nor seen in too long.

It was a tough job to keep the Sprout quite during the ceremony...and her Uncle!

We didn't have a lot of time to play in our favorite city, cause Pops had to get back and get ready for the first day of school, but there were two stops we had to make. 

Us at 99 Bottles.

We had lunch at the place we met, 99 Bottles, and visited the Sock Shop and Shoe Company my favorite job (pre-Pippi's of course) and the place my love obsession with socks began. I was hoping to catch E & E the owners ( it was a Saturday so I knew it was a long shot) they gave me my start and training with buying and managing and were supportive when I moved back home to open my own store. They are great people and their shop is amazing. We think of them fondly and wanted to say hi sadly, the big E's were not in but their daughter was working the sock area! It was cool to see her after 5 years, (I hope my kids take an interest in the business).
We shoe shopped of course, spent too much but left happy! We got lucky too, there was a sweet girl working who read Sprout books while we shoe shopped (thanks June!). Anyway, it was a quick trip, but a good one, next time we will have to do a mini Santa Cruz vacation and hit up all our old haunts.

a little snack...

Auntie B trying to amuse Zo, she is not a fan of the car.

We may wait a while for another car trip though...with potty stops, nursing stops and miscellaneous stops it took us forever to get home!