Gwilliam Family Trip

This year our Gwilliam Family Trip was in Santa Cruz.

We were so excited when the families started arriving from Utah and Texas.

Scott and Ruby

We were all looking foreward to spending the weekend at the beach with our family, but when the piles of everything we had to take started growing I started wondering why I thought a weekend at the beach would be an easy reunion to be in charge of for 30 people.  This wasn't even close to everything we had to bring.

We borrowed a couple of surfboards from a customer of Mike's - thought I'd take a picture of my California surfer girl mom van :)

We stopped to look at the beautiful view of the ocean and were lucky enough to see a lot of dolphins swimming near the shore.  We even saw some jumping out of the water.  It was very cool!

We invited all the Gwilliams to meet us at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk to start off our weekend.

Megan, McKayla and Kaitlyn

Blake and Logan couldn't wait to get down to the water.

The older kids rode the Giant Dipper together.

Next we headed to the hotel to get dinner ready.  It was so nice to have so much help throughout the weekend.  Here Megan, Emily and Kaitlyn are frosting cupcakes for me.

The hotel let us use their breakfast room for our dinner, but there weren't enough seats for everyone - fortunately they didn't seem to care.

Aubrey, Brinley and Caroline

The best part about the weekend was watching the cousins having so much fun together.  They seemed to have a great time together from beginning to end.

Ruby and McKayla

Aubrey, Emily, Lindsey and Caroline

Megan, Kaitlyn, Kyle and Conner

Logan and Tyson

The whole group.

The only bad part about the weekend was that my brother Eric got sick right before the trip so his family was not able to come.  We missed them tons and were especially sad because it was going to be the first time we were all together in years.  So the above picture is of the 30 Gwilliam's that were able to make it to Santa Cruz.  Six more Gwilliams from Idaho were sadly not there.

The cousins

They were much more into doing goofy pictures than the more formal ones.

My parents and my siblings - minus Eric :(

I will post day 2 of our trip in another post because I want to include a ton of pictures and blogger is making that difficult for me right now.  Day 2 to follow soon.