Houston, San Francisco and Santa Cruz
Oct 1-10, 2021
AC7719 YYZ-IAH, Oct 6 IAH-SFO, Oct 10 AC8843 SFO-YVR, AC126 YVR-YYZ
With the border open, we had a couple of reasons to visit the US. First, my retirement from ExxonMobil was being commemorated with a party that I couldn’t miss, and Tom’s niece was getting married in California. We combined it into one trip with a number of Houston with friends and celebration, and then made our way to San Francisco to kick off the wedding.
Oct 2
With over 26 years of working at Imperial and ExxonMobil, I was lucky to have a number of good friends who all gathered for good food, drinks and fun both in the formal retirement party and informally. The big dinner was Oct 2nd.
After a great party, I still had another day to visit to the Exxon campus and connect with some people who didn’t make it to the event.
Oct 4/5
After a few days of catching up with folks at the campus, I captured a few last images from the campus as a final goodbye.
Oct 6
With the Houston celebrations behind us, we had a morning flight to San Francisco and BART ride into town. We were able to catch up with our friends Yuka and Robert and dine al fresco on the waterfront.
Oct 7
After breakfast, we had the morning to explore San Francisco before we needed to go to Santa Cruz and the wedding festivities.
After our walk through Santa Cruz, we found some local Mexican food for dinner and got ready for the wedding events to follow. On the Friday, we helped prepare for the party and with high winds in the area were faced with some scheduled power disruptions to prevent forest fires. Tom went into contingency mode and rented a generator to keep the preparations going.
Oct 9
The wedding was at the beautiful Sequoia Retreat Center in the Santa Cruz mountains and was a beautiful backdrop for the wedding. Although the Hopson contingent was relatively small, it was a wonderful celebration.
The party in the forest went late into the night and we made our way back to our nearby hotel.
Oct 10
With the official festivities done, we stopped by for an informal breakfast and goodbyes before making our way back to San Francisco for our late flight back to Toronto, through Vancouver and an overnight redeye.
