Abstract: The quest towards building a practical quantum computer using superconducting materials and Josephson junctions has made rapid progress over the past several years. Experimental demonstrations ranged from high fidelity single qubit gates to elementary two-qubit gates. One major step towards continued progress consists of understanding all major sources of decoherence that destroy the fragile quantum states. In this talk we provide an overview of our experimental efforts using superconducting qubits. Our qubit is a tunable flux qubit coupled to a high quality transmission line resonator. We show quantum information storage in the resonator with lifetimes of a few microseconds. The qubit itself is shown to have short coherence times, which are not well understood at present. One possible mechanism may be due to stray capacitance of the qubit to ground and bias leads. We present a simple model of decoherence due to the stray capacitances and speculate on future design strategies.