And of course, a trip to Pasedena wouldn't be complete without a visit to Todd and Alex's employer, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Completely by coincidence, the Phoenix lander was scheduled to touch down on Mars a couple days after we arrived. Consequently, JPL had a number of exhibits set…

Also in the same tent were scale models of the rovers on two different missions. Here you see the Mars Pathfinder rover..

..and next to it, a scale model of the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), Spirit and Opportunity, which were pretty much identical.

This is a half scale model of the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, MRO, which is the project Todd has been the Chief Engineer on for the past four years.

The steely-eyed missile man and the very proud older brother.

One of the most impressive things to see inside the facility is the mission control center which bears a very strong resemblance to the mission control center…

Another interesting stop was the clean room where the spacecraft are assembled prior to being shipped to the Cape. The initial builds underway are for the Mars…

A solo photo of Zoom

"The kid" got his father's genes and is quite an accomplished cook. The menu on this night was chicken paprikash, one of our favorite dishes handed down from…

This is the retractable pool cover that was required to keep the pups safe after a few initial and unintentional swims.

We were given a number of sightseeing tours around Los Angeles and one of them took us to the Griffith Observatory which recently finished a major renovation.…