The End of My California Journal

Hi everyone. Happy start of the weekend to you.

It's going to be (or so the weather people say) rainy and wet Saturday here in New Hampshire, but yesterday we had some gorgeous weather. Spring is hopefully getting the upper hand over winter.  It' Maple Weekend here in New Hampshire. I'm off to my daughter's future in-laws home today to help process some maple sap into maple syrup, which should be fun.

I want to wrap up this week's posts with the rest of the pages from my California journal. I finally finished it off (it took me awhile to get back to it). I had hoped to finish it before I packed up my workspace, but that didn't happen, so one day while I was waiting for everything else I was working on to dry, I decided to finish it.

I'm not quite sure if I've posted any of these pages before; I think maybe just this first one was in an older post.

We're wrapping up the trip at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. In the top page I did a bit of stenciling and cut these otters off a card I bought specifically to make this page. Funny, when I saw it at the aquarium's gift shop, I knew what I wanted to do with it.

And below, I cut up the info on the free map they give you and also added this sticker, plus some tapes, metallic trim and doodling.

It even has a little flip up part.

I used this scrap of paper from an earlier page and added the free little seafood watch folder.  

My next page describes the last hotel we stayed at. We had a 6 AM flight Friday morning, so we needed to stay near the airport. This hotel was maybe 8 -10 minutes away from the airport, and it had good reviews. Plus it was a bit cheaper than the chain motels, and since we'd need to leave our room in the middle of the night to do all those end of trip airport things you need to do (return the rental car, check  suitcases, get through security), I figured if I could save some money, I would.  I booked the room online before we even left on the trip.

If you are ever flying out of San Francisco airport, I wouldn't recommend you stay at this hotel. The hotel itself wasn't horrible, but it was right on the main drag. Our room was right on the road so it was loud. Thankfully running the AC somewhat helped with that. Our room was clean but rather dark and cluttered with big pieces of furniture so there wasn't anyplace to put our suitcases except on the floor in the corners. There was also this sketchy teenager selling little plastic wrapped packages out of a  Dunkin Donuts shopping sized bag in the back parking lot and out in front of the building.  We ran into him twice in the elevator too. I can only suspect what he was doing.

 The hotel didn't work for me, and I was glad to head to the airport just after 3 AM. 

At the airport, "things" went  off without any hitches, and we got on our flight and were headed back east.

Here I used some old travel stickers in my stash and this postcard also in my stash. I could flip it open and write about the flight home.

On this next page I used one of the 2 boarding passes for the 2 flights home, the back of a playing card, some stickers and some travel items I cut out of a magazine.

And finally, here's the end of the book.  On the left I used all the luggage tag stickers as paper, as well as some washi tape as a border. I put a bit of gesso over the luggage tags, used an old photo of Maddie and Pete, a New Hampshire sticker, some letter stickers, as well as my tea stirrer from the flight.

And on the right I added a small paper bag (the otter card came in it) so put in a few other items I wanted to save but that were either too hard to add to the book or didn't fit.

Voila. There's my journal my this trip. I'm trying to talk my husband into taking some time off in May or early June for another little journey, but so far he keeps telling me he's too busy at work. It might be too late to get cheap airfare, but we could do a small driving adventure, if gas isn't too pricey by then. I guess I'll have to keep mentioning it to him a bit more.  Ha ha ha ha.

I hope you do something fun this weekend.  And as always, thanks for visiting my blog.