The Knutti Family Blog: Sacramento - A Tale of a Wedding and Bad Road Signs

Photo-dump at the end in case that's all you care about. Which I'll forgive. Probably.

Jacob's extended family has a similar set up to mine - his father's side of the family had 9 kids and there are a billion cousins, many of whom he couldn't recognize if he passed them on the street. His mother's side is smaller with just a couple of cousins that he knows better. I should mention that he does actually know many of his Wall cousins pretty well too, whereas I think I have several cousins that live in my same metropolitan area and I have no clue what they look like. But I digress...

One of Jacob's cousins, Martin, moved to the Phoenix area about a year ago and we've had him over a couple of times. Some of those times he brought a girl, Erin, with him and, as predicted, they ended up getting married the end of May in Sacramento. Since this cousin was one that Jacob was closer to growing up, he wanted to go and after much discussion and favor-calling-in, we decided that I'd go too and we'd make a weekend away of it.

Silly though it may be, one of my stipulations for going was that I didn't want to miss any of my kids' birthdays. Knowing the spread of their birthdays, that takes some maneuvering for anything in late May. But we managed to leave the day after Speed's birthday and come back late the night before Thor's birthday.

As an added bonus, we found out that a couple of our Utah friends were driving through northern California the night we flew out on the way to their parents' house. So we found a place to meet up but expected to be flexible based on timing, traffic, etc.

Our flight out was pretty uneventful - US Airways is just always such a mess but we made it safely and on time so I shouldn't complain too much. The Sacramento airport was very weird to me. The airports I've frequented are very compact - even if they are big airports, everything is close together or at least has a train where you're passing all manner of necessary buildings to get to your destination. We took a 10 minute bus ride to get from the terminal to the rental car building and we passed....one gas station and a whole lot of nothing. I wondering more than once if we'd gotten on the wrong bus and were going to end up at some weird place we had no intention of being.

We eventually made it to the rental car place and got in line behind several other people. And waited. And waited. And waited. After 25 minutes (!) of the line not moving, Jacob finally went to go try the automated machine. Because: why not? After several loading screens, he got the message that "All attendants are busy. Please try back later." Riiiiiight. After several phone calls to our friends to apologize for being late, we set a new place to meet and promised we'd be there as soon as we could.

After we picked up our "mid-sized truck" (a Chevrolet Trax - the people at Hertz and I disagree about what a "mid-sized truck" means apparently), we did our best to follow our directions to the highway to our new meeting spot. You'd think after so many years of this exact thing happening we'd learn that I should NOT navigate new places...but we trusted my directions and ended up going the opposite direction we were supposed to be going. Once we got ourselves figured out, we called our friends, apologized one more time and promised to be there soon - for reals this time. In my defense, the sign did say highway 99. It just didn't saw which direction on highway 99, which became a running theme of our trip.

We finally made it to the Chili's where we met our friends. It was SO good to see them! Jacob makes it back to Utah once a year or so for fishing but I haven't been back in 4 years. We talk all the time when we play our online games but it was fun to actually see them, having some decent food, and catch up with what's new that isn't related to pixels.
:-)

Once we wrapped up dinner, Jacob and I got back on the road to go to our hotel for the night. Our hotel was in Rocklin, which is where more of the family lived and closer to where the wedding and reception would be. Jacob took over navigating (thankfully!) and we still had some confusion about if we were going the right way. There was this whole long section of the highway where we were on the highway (we think) but there were concrete dividers on either side of us and our lane was going 45 mph slower than the rest of traffic. Very confusing.

There was a bit more drama navigating to our hotel but when the map doesn't match the streets...yeah. Even when we could see the hotel, we had trouble figuring out which streets would actually lead us to it. Eventually we saw this little 8x10 sign that said "Hotel" on it with an arrow that pointed us in the right direction. California, you need to have a serious talk with your sign-makers.

The next morning we got all wedding-pretty and headed off to Andy and Kim's house. Andy is Martin's older brother and he actually lives in Rocklin. Andy had the distinct privilege of being in Nicole's freshmen BYU ward and living with us while I was pregnant with Hazel, so we go way back. We also got to spend lots of time with him leading up to and during his engagement to his wife, Kim. She's is pure awesomeness and it was so, so fun to get so see her again. They have two little kids, a boy the same age as Zizah and a little girl the same age as Thor. So at least I got my toddler/baby fix while we were away from our kids. :-) Eventually we headed off to the temple for the crux of the whole trip.

Jacob was a gentleman and dropped me and our passengers (Nathan - brother of the groom - and his girlfriend) off at the curb. However, he learned that chivalry has a sense of irony when he was all alone when he smacked himself in the head with the car door. So there he was, sitting in the Sacramento Temple parking lot, bleeding from a cut just above his eye, all alone....poor thing. The nice temple workers helped him get cleaned up and into the waiting room just before our group got called back for the sealing. It was fun to see two more of Jacob's aunts and uncles who came into down for the festivities.

The ceremony was lovely and very sweet. The sealer was the temple president and he was super cute - he talked really fast. I don't know if it was from nerves or that's just how he usually talks, but he was really cute and I liked him a lot. We got to spend a lot of time there on the temple grounds while everyone took pictures. It's one of the temples that's hidden, meaning you don't see it until you get right in front of it but the grounds were very nice. Lots of good talks and good laughs.

After that, we headed to the Old Spaghetti Factory for the luncheon. I did make one social faux pas when I told Jacob to get up and introduce ourselves and give our congratulations to the bride and groom. Turned out I misheard Uncle Ralph and it was only the groomsmen and bridesmaids who were supposed to be getting up. Whoops - my bad. The real triumph of the luncheon (for me) was that Andy's almost-3-year-old finally said we were friends. I'd been asking all day but it took until he had a big pasta dinner in his tummy that he finally said we could be friends. Win. :-)

Then we headed back to Andy and Kim's house to relax and so their kids could nap. It was both nice and a little sad to no be worrying about sippy cups and nap times this trip. Kim, Nadia (Nathan's girlfriend), and I went out for a while to get stuff to decorate the newlywed's get-away car. That didn't end up happening, but we did end up stuffing the really good stuff into a Doc McStuffins bag and surreptitiously handing that to Martin on our way out of the reception.

The reception was at the bride's parent's house. It was a really pretty property, almost farm-like, in Loomis. The bugs and I didn't get along but that's not really news to anyone. The food was good, the company was fun and it was a nice time. I don't think that Jacob endeared us to Erin's father when he introduced us in the reception line by saying who we were and then saying, "I really hate California, but your house is very nice." Once you know Jacob, you realized that's quite the compliment but considering this was the second time we'd met the man...ah well.

After the reception, we went back to hangout at Andy and Kim's house a bit more. I got to read their son a bedtime story (I was missing my kids just a bit - is it obvious?) and then we just hung out and talked until people started falling asleep. Time with these cousins is always so much fun.

The extended family was all busy the next day so we were on our own. We had a nice breakfast at the hotel and then got to go see the new Avengers movie. I didn't love it as much as the first one but I really, really liked it. Definitely some sad parts (Joss, stop killing the good characters!). Then I navigated us poorly to a mall and we got some yummy sushi for lunch and window shopped and then headed back to the airport. We got to the airport SO early. We figured it would take us about as long to get back as it took us to get there but either we got lost less (yes) or there was less traffic (yes) or it's just easier to get out of California than it is to get into it (also yes). But there was a NBA game on and I had a book to read, so we just relaxed and enjoyed our time until we got on the plane.

Plane ride back was also uneventful, as was our last bit of travel home. I still don't love traveling, but I enjoy it in small doses and I really love the feeling of coming home, especially with four little cuties waiting for me. Hazel and Speed were still up waiting to show us the Welcome Home banner and cookies they had made for us. We headed to bed pretty early to have energy for the big event the next day....Someone was turning 1 ::dundundun::