Girls' Trip 2010

Almost ten years ago, February 2001 to be exact, my favorite girls in the world and I made a time capsule. Jessie was leaving on her mission to France, and the rest of us were all on the brink of doing great things in our lives, so we made some predictions for the next ten years and added some of our best memories from our years as friends.

Last weekend we all loaded up in the family van and headed to Huntington Beach to open up the time capsule and spend some girl time together.

We started our trip with lunch at In N Out.

Sarah is lucky enough to already reside in southern California, so she met us in Huntington Beach. We got to stay in John (Julie and Jessie's brother) and Michele's apartment which was a few steps away from main street and just up the street from the beach. The weekend we picked happened to be windy and cold, but we still found some fun things to do that kept us out of the bad weather.

Some highlights from our trip:

• After we got there and met up with Sarah, we walked down to the pier. We were greeted by a group of pro-pot protesters.

One of my favorite protesters was this man:

Notice the oxygen tank. Looks like smoking marijuana hasn't been too kind to his body, but he was still out there fighting for it.

My other favorite protester was this girl:

Jessica borrowed this poster just for us to get some cute pictures for our blogs.

• We attempted to go to the beach, but it was FREEZING outside.

Instead we did some shopping and tried out Ra Sushi, which was recommended to us by our host Michele.

Our picture didn't turn out great, but the sushi was awesome.

And I can't forget about the McGyver/MacGruber job Jessica did on our way to Ra. She fixed Sarah's window with salad tongs and some playing cards:

• We opened the time capsule:
  
  

Yeah we opened it a little early, but with Jessica starting her residency in Atlanta and Sarah maybe moving back to England, we had to pick a time when all of us could make it to the opening. Life gets more complicated when you have to grow up.

Here's a collage of some of the embarrassing things we found inside. Hopefully the pictures are small enough that you can't really see any of them.

This is just a tiny fraction of the stuff we had in there, but these were some of my favorites. There's a ticket to No Doubt which was the best concert Julie, Jessica, and I had ever been to, some pictures from the Idaho ranch and Jackson Hole, a picture from Julie's supermodel days, and an oldie of me running with my Super Big Gulp that had to have come from our favorite 7-11 on Russell and Mtn. Vista.

And most of our predictions looked like this:

This is Jessie's. Notice 7 kids for me. In ten years. Seriously? And I'll be living in Utah? Everyone said this...except me. I knew better. No snow for me thanks. And poor Sarah got picked by all of us to have the ugliest kids just because she's English and the men she gets to choose from have notoriously bad teeth. Jessie even drew a picture of the bad teeth in case we didn't quite understand. We were pretty mean with our predictions ten years ago, so we made some predictions for our trip in 2020 that were a little less harsh.

A lot has changed since ten years ago when we were all in college or finishing college. Julie got married in December the same year we put the time capsule together and had Riley two years later and Ridge four years after Riley. I left BYU at the end of 2001, which was not something I had ever planned on doing. I met Kevin about a month after leaving and got married in August 2002. I then had three kids in five years. Jessica graduated from UCLA and went off to Baltimore to do her pre-med schooling. She just graduated from Emory University as a doctor and starts her residency in anesthesiology right now. Jessie finished her mission in France and got home just in time to be a bridesmaid at my wedding. She met Chris and married him after turning down proposals from the rest of the world. She finished law school, passed the bar exam, and had three kids in about four years. Sarah went back to England after graduating from SDSU. She did well there but always felt the ache for her American home in San Diego. She came back to SD a year and a half ago but plans to go back to England since things aren't working out for her to be able to stay. If we could just find someone to marry her for a couple of years, she wouldn't have to leave. But we know she'll be back as soon as she makes her money from the business she's inheriting from her grandma.

And that's our lives in ten years in a nutshell. I'm excited to see what adventures await us in the next ten years...