Friday, January 14, 2011

California Desert Cities

Took a fun drive through Joshua Tree National Park in the Jeep on an un-maintained road. I got to do all the driving for the first time on one of these jaunts. Got rather exciting for the last half hour in the dark when the roads were at their worst...but we made it through. I loved it. Gregg sweated it...


Had a personal RV driving lesson today - wow! I learned SO much. Now I can back up, turn corners, get into parking spaces, drive on city streets. Great teacher and fun learning. I highly recommend this to all my RVing girlfriends.

Also had Gregg teach me all the procedures for unhooking and hooking up to utilities, etc, everything needed for me to make a trip on my own. Which I plan to do in Feb and take my kids over to NM to visit my sister. Road trip!!!


Celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary yesterday. Gregg took me to his favorite restaurant for lunch. I got to help choose a dinner restaurant. The Chop House was great.










Saw the Palm Springs Follies which is a great show - 20 years old now. The singers and dancers are all 50+ years old, some in their 70's and 80's and they look, and dance, great! Lots of comedy, wonderful songs from 40's, 50's, 60's, fantastic costumes. We loved it!
Lesley Gore was special guest star, did several numbers and met the audience in the lobby after. She is no taller than me! Said she took the words "short" and "old" out of her vocabulary. Good idea!

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Enjoying Orange County

We're in an RV park just a 1 mile walk from Disneyland so we HAD to go there for a day...and I loved it while Gregg tolerated it OK.













Did some old classics like Autopia and I never pass up a carousel ride - one of my rules for enjoying life.








Re-visited some old favorite places from when I lived here in the 80's like the Balboa Island Ferry.


Still on our Presidential Library quest, we visited our 9th of 12 in Yorba Linda at the Nixon Library. These life-size statues of world leaders were great. Here's Gregg with Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer. The room was full with Golda Meier, Anwar El-Sadat, Chou En-lai, Mao Tse-tung, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Yoshida.
One thing we love in these libraries are the surprising little things that are found. This is a note to Nixon from Elvis Presley with his phone numbers. He was offering to help combat drug abuse.


Had a great evening with a lot of Gregg's cousins from his mother's family that live in this area. Big group of us and we all had so much fun together, we are planning a McDonald family reunion in Iowa in August.


2010 Rand McNally

I love coloring these maps as we move around each year. We get a new one for each year and have quite a collection now. Of course, we get the Walmart edition, only $6.97 and includes listings of all Walmarts and Sam's all over the US, Canada and Mexico.
Did a good job of covering the US in '10!
2011 only has a little speck in CA so far but we'll start moving eastward again soon...