Taylor Gang: A Jet Set Christmas!

Highlights of Christmas break 2012:

*getting a nice long much needed break from grad school and 1st grade school

*spending the night with my grandparents who live in Utah before I left for Houston <3 p="p">

*fun times with family

*going to TopGolf with my Dad (a 3 story driving range)

*shopping with my mom before Matt arrived into town...he can't hang with us when it comes to shopping!

*seeing the lights in River Oaks

*not eating out ONCE while we here in TX...totally insane, and not really a highlight

*FINALLY seeing my Aunt's amazing 20ft. tall Christmas tree

*beating the boys at Cranium!!

*San Fran trip, the Cardinals game, our bomb hotel, and going to Alcatraz!!

My pop's took us to TopGolf. I'm mad that I forgot to get a group picture of all of us!

We spent Christmas Eve with Dave's side of the family at my Uncle Joe and Bob's loft in the Heights. My uncle, Joe made the MOST DELISH cheesecake I've ever had in my life. Everyone loved it, and I'll post the recipe soon!

Love this cutie kid...

When it was Grandpoppy's turn to pick a gift, he thought he as allowed to look into every bag to see what he wanted. :)

Angel DID NOT like this...

My Aunt's owns this amazing store in The Heights close to downtown Houston. She opened the store late Christmas Eve to let us pick out some last minute gifts. We definitely felt like VIP's!

On Christmas morning, we opened presents with my parents. They hooked us up! One of the many perks of being an only child ;) #spoilednotabrat lol

Later that morning, the rest of these crazy people came over to my house to eat our traditional Mexican food Christmas lunch and open presents.

Trust fall!

Awww!

Devon's lovely Uncle Michael gave Dev this picture blown up on a canvas! Apparently, Devon had a little too much fun on Lake Houston this past summer. If it was possible for this kid to blush with embarrassment, he definitely did. Soooo funny.

We can always count on this guy to make us all laugh.

I was a little nervous to open my gift from Michael. Luckily it was just a cute pic of my mom and me. Phew...

My gifts to my Aunt Edith...

Lil did NOT like that baby doll on the floor. Every time we would put it in her cart, she would throw it out and run over it. Another priceless moment!

Mike's amazing Christmas sweater. Sarah safety pinned all those bows on there!

The power was out for most of Christmas night due to CRAZY amounts of wind, so we drove downtown to see the lights in a fancy pants River Oaks. There was a whole street with trees like this! AMAZING!

My BFF, Anna, came over to visit!

We worked on a puzzle, and I found the missing piece of the border on the floor! The border took us 3 hours to finish, so we called it good, and didn't finish the rest. :)
Let's maybe do a 500 piece puzzle next year guys?

The day after Christmas, we headed back to ID to have Christmas with Matt's family. It was stressful getting back to ID due to snow storms in Salt Lake. We were finally 45 minutes outside of the snowstorms and SLC, when I looked in the backseat and realized we forgot a bag at the baggage claim! So annoying! It was soo good to make it to the in-law's house, open presents, and eat dinner.

Matt bought his lil bro, Mikey, a "zombie survival kit" for his birthday.

On the 28th we headed to San Francisco! It was my anniversary/Christmas gift to Matt. Matt of course brought his horse mask.

I'm sure the lady sitting next to us thought we were super weird.

Our awesome hotel, Parc 55 Whyndam! We arrived to her hotel around 10:30 pm and were STARVING! We looked up some reviews on Yelp for good places to eat close to our hotel. We found a Thai place that looked promising and made our way over. We were just walking with a lot of normal looking tourists, when we turned onto this creepy dark street, that apparently, everyone else knew not to go down. Not really looking ahead, we had to walk like 2 LONG blocks down streets with tonssss of homeless people. It was freaky because they were all cracked out and trippin bad! I was POWER walking with my fists balled up thinking, "I AM NOT GETTING STABBED/JUMPED ON MY VACATION!" We made it safely to Bangkok noodle and had a delish dinner.

Our hotel room was SWEET! It was on the 28th floor, and it overlooked all of San Fran. Matt and I are wimps when it comes to heights so it took a little getting used to.

The view from our room!

The next day we were the ultimate Cali tourists. In one day we went to:

1. the "Full House" street

2. Lombard (that really windy street in SF)

3. Fisherman's Warf to eat at Bubba Gumps

4. Golden Gate Bridge

5. Alcatraz

Here's our first stop at the place where the opening song of "Full House" was filmed.

We thought it would be hilarious as we walked up where everyone was snapping pictures of the street to blast the "Full House" theme song while we were taking pictures. Turns out, no one laughed, they all just looked at us weird, and WE still aren't sure if they knew why they were there and what they were taking pictures of.

I asked a lady to take a pic of us, and she took like 20. I won't post the others because they are super awkward lol!

My left leg looks broken here.

Our next stop was the Golden Gate Bridge, not to be mistaken for the Brooklyn Bridge. I could NOT stop calling it the Brooklyn B Ridge the WHOLE TRIP! There was a suicide hotline right before you start walking over the water.

Our last adevnture of the day was ALCATRAZ! Let me go back to when we first got to SF. I called to see about getting tickets because Matt REALLY wanted to go. They were sold out till next week, and we were SO bummed about not going. So on Saturday, we went to the Alcatraz dock anyway to see if we could somehow get tickets. We talked to EVERYONE who worked there, with no luck. They told us that we should come back later for the night tour and see if anyone had extra tickets in line. Matt's not the type to get really excited about things, so I knew we HAD to get tickets! We came back to the dock before the final tour, and we and all the workers there from the ticket lady, to the security guards were trying to find anyone with extra tickets. Let me tell you, these things were like impossible to find. People on Craig's List were offering to pay double the price for tickets. Anyway, 2 Aussie's came up to us and gave us one of their tickets! They refused to let us pay them, and they were true angels! So we had 1 more ticket to find! I told Matt to just go into the line and yell out, "Does anyone have one extra ticket we could buy?!" He did it, and sure enough, the lady standing right next to him had one!!! WE GOT TO GO! The workers and security guards gave me high fives and hugs because they were so happy for us haha! It felt like we had won the lotto or something!

The coveted tickets...

The view from the ferry ride.

We kept snapping random pictures down empty hallways and into jail cells to see if we would see a ghost on the picture. We didn't find one...

So this cell 14 was a solitary confinement cell. We read a story (that wasn't mentioned in the tour) about this cell. Apparently, a prisoner one night who was confined here started screaming to a guard to let him out of the cell because there was a monster in his cell. They didn't let him out, and the next morning, they found him dead with strangle marks all over his neck. CREEPYYY! Matt said he got a strange feeling walking into that cell.

This was the view of San Fran from Alcatraz. The prisoners said on New Year's Eve they could here parties on the shore, and it would make them go crazy to be able to hear normal society so close, but they were trapped.

After Alcatraz, I was in a creepy mood lol.

On Sunday, we headed over to the 49er's vs. Cardinals NFL game. I surprised Matt with tickets to the game on our 4 year anni. The Cards absolutely sucked, but it was still way fun. Our seats were on row 18 of the lower bowl on the 50 yard line!