California San Jose Mission

There are a million things you could do on P-Day. Like, just go do it. I know sometimes you're really tired and you don't want to. You kind of just want to, like, stay in for P-Day, talk to your family and stuff, but I would highly encourage you to just go see things because San Jose is so unique and you just won't get that back. None of us will probably ever live in San Jose or the Bay Area around there ever again. So, go see things, go to parks, and go to the ocean. You know, go to weird museums. Like, just go.

Basketball's fun, but if you're going to be in the San Jose area, especially like South San Jose or in Santa Cruz, you have some of the absolute best mountain biking possible. And there's a member that also used to work for the Santa Cruz bike shop. So we would save up our money and instead of playing basketball, we'd all head to the mountains and go do some single track downhill, bike around. No one ever got hurt. It's gorgeous and the most fun you can have in the Redwoods. I would highly recommend getting into it.

My favorite P days were in the south when I was serving in the south area because that's when you're kind of in Monterey County and you have access to some of those beautiful tourist attractions in the whole world. Like people pay big money to go there. Anyways, so one of my P day activities was the day that we we woke up and we drove to Big Sur, which is just this beautiful place kind of off the coastal highway and it was absolutely gorgeous and such a cool P day, so definitely recommend that.

California has so many cool places in each area. You can definitely just ask the missionaries before or like people that have been there what they've done. But like I think my favorite area for P-Day was Santa Cruz because we got to walk by the beach and yeah just so many lookouts and you can do hikes. I always did volleyball on P-Days. You can honestly do that if your area just doesn't have a lot of sites to go look at and also while you're playing volleyball if your companion doesn't want to they can be talking to their family or emailing so it's a win-win.

A good thing to get into, especially if you're an elder, is tie making. If you're in San Jose, or areas around about, a very affluent area, people have a lot of money, very trendy, you know, a lot of these west coast things, very trendy, and you can make like ties and whatnot that kind of go with what everybody's wearing. Something like really floral things, you know, kind of out there, more hippie-like sometimes you'll find. So making ties is a good idea. Also, if you're in like Santa Clara, or some other areas, there's a place called Golfland, super fun mini golf arcade games, usually owned by a member. I think actually a few of them are, by one member owns all of them. Be nice to them, and maybe they'll let you in for free, like they did for me. So there's a good idea for you.

See the sights, if you can. When I served in Hollister, about 45 minutes south, was Pinnacles National Park, and that was a beautiful park. We hiked there. We spent probably eight hours there, just hiking, going into the caves, and just seeing the beautiful scenery, wonderful pictures that I still have. So of course, preparation day, you can play basketball, get together with your district to have an activity and all that, but I encourage you to also just take a look at just the beauty that's in the San Jose Mission, especially if you're along the coast. You're very fortunate because there's so many beautiful places to visit along there.

With my mission precedence, they allowed us to go on the beach. We could be on the sand in p-day clothes on p-days, but couldn't go in the water. So we would go to Santa Cruz sometimes, that was fun, and Monterey Beach has a gorgeous beach. If you're up north, you could hike Mission Peak in Fremont. There's lots of great trails up there. If you are West Bay on the peninsula, you can go to Stanford and check out the museums and art there. There's also Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and tons of other big tech companies that you can go tour on p-days.