December Nights in Balboa Park

We got to visit Balboa Park for the first time tonight.  It is AMAZING!  (Granted it will be even more amazing when there are not 300,000 people there!)  Balboa Park is home to the San Diego Zoo, Museum of Man, Automotive Museum, Science Museum, Natural History Museum, Air and Space Museum, and many more that I can't even remember.  It is huge and the buildings are architecturally unique and really awesome.  (I would have said amazing again, but I think I already used that word too many times in one paragraph!)

Anyway, it was December Nights in Balboa Park.  A 2 day international Christmas festival where there is food from all countries, a fair, lights, and the museums are free from 5-9 p.m.  It really was quite fun, and our kiddos hung in there really well for the amount of time we were there walking around.  Here are some pictures:

A huge climbing tree on our way into the park.  

Beautiful buildings.

The Museum of Man.

The Whoville Tree!

Carolers.

Two cute kids!

The bagpipe man! He was a trooper because he was simply warming up, but I was determined to get a picture.  He was the nicest looking of all the bagpipe players!

Chinese dragon.

Air and Space Museum

Automotive museum.  I have no idea what type of car this is, and I know that some of you will be offended by that.  I just knew it was a cool red car, so I took a picture!

Santa was in the automotive museum!  (I'm totally hoping that this counts as our visit to Santa this year. Micah said that is cheating!)

This is the stage area where the performers were.  Really beautiful area.  (It has an official name, but I have no idea what that might be. )

Then we visited the Science museum, where we happened upon the GROSSOLOGY exhibit.  It was, by far, the favorite of the night.  Can you guess why?!

GROSS!

This was DE-sgusting, as Ben would say!

A life-sized operation game.

We will definitely revisit this museum on a school field trip soon!

Cool silhouette pic by the fountain.

And another...

LOTS of people by the time we were heading out.

Really cool buildings, and I am still loving that there are palm trees instead of oaks or something.

And my two "homies" ready to leave the park!  (Sorry that they look possessed!  Still working on those editing and photography skills.)

Another fun family outing in SoCal.  We enjoyed our evening with our favorite tour guides (and awesome friends), The Hammond Family!  Nathanael was calling us tourists when I was snapping the silhouette pictures.  I told him I may be a tourist for the next 10 years here.  There are SO many things to experience.  Such a blessing to get to go on new adventures.