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!

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...

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum

Up in Simi Valley now at a nice Ventura County park, waiting out a cold, rainy storm. Good time to catch up on blogging, pictures, etc.

Saw some of the the Reagan Museum as much is closed for remodeling and a Grand Re-Opening on 2/5/11, celebrating 100 years since Reagan's birth. What we did see, we liked, so will definitely return someday to see the renovations.

We toured this 707 Air Force One that was used by 7 US Presidents Nixon through GW Bush, decomissioned on 9-8-01. Cool to be inside that!

Temporary exhibit of US history represented by Christmas trees. One tree for each decade since 1770's. Fascinating! This 1950's tree has Barbie, TV, radio, Cat in the Hat, Disneyland, Korean War and more.

Another temporary exhibit, a model White House - full room size, about 8 feet tall. The detail is amazing. Built and maintained by the Zeifel family.

Beautiful gardens and grounds and views - darn the rain and cold!

Some of the Berlin Wall that Reagan brought down.

Rose Parade 01/01/11

Click this picture for just a few ...well, 87...photos from our Rose Parade adventure. We absolutely loved this, despite near-freezing temperatures! We will definitely come do this again. It was especially fun to have our friend Amy Kaye join us for the parade, to meet new friends on the street, to run into Gloria and Charlie Goss (who we had worked with at the Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque in Oct), and to see Gregg's cousins Dan and Marge.

We haven't yet figured out how to be there earlier to work on floats which we would like to do another year. The issue is parking the RV in a safe place near the float work areas and not paying an arm and leg to do so. Parking at the Rose Stadium is $100 per night with NO hook-ups. We just won't do that. Street parking not allowed until the 29th and we wouldn't want to leave the RV there, unattended for a full day. RV parks are pretty far away. Gotta figure this one out for a future year.

Wonderful Christmas week

Got to see Sally's kids Sarah and Andy before leaving town...

On our way out of Arizona, stopped in Yuma to see Jan & Chuck Moore and got this cool Christmas picture - Jan with a tree on her head, me with a halo. Awww- how sweet.

2008 Cancun, 2009 Belize, 2010 San Diego

Our progression of beaches and sunshine for Christmas. We've loved this year being in the RV if not in the ocean snorkeling. We'll probably repeat this one after maybe trying South Texas next year.
We got to see my cousins Judy and John and my Aunt Betty. Went out dancing to live music at a cool bar called Belly Up.

Got to see a friend, Sylvia, I haven't seen in about 12 years and her new husband Bill. (Forgot to get their picture - darn!) Always fun to reconnect.
Santa was SO good to us - new 2011 Rand McNally (with Wal Marts), new RV step stool and a cool sign for our front window...

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Christmas dinner at the Marine Room, awesome restuarant on the water in La Jolla. Awesome filet mignon and rack of lamb...










One of our favorite things is a bike path right out of our campground. From here we rode 15 miles one day all around Mission Bay and an island in the middle of the bay. Then the next day, only 3 miles to Pacific Beach then down the boardwalk and back for another 15 mile or so day.



Oh yes - we will be back here to San Diego! Great trip. Next stop - Pasadena for the Rose Bowl Parade.

Happy Holidays!

We consider ourselves to be S-O-O-O blessed to be able to roam around our great USA the way we do in our RV and to be comfortable in our 300 or so square feet and to know that we can get along just fine, with each other and with ourselves, with so little. We have been able to visit so many friends and family and to meet wonderful new friends along the way.
B-U-T we do find we miss just a couple of things: Our longest and best friends, Arizona and our hometown of Prescott. Prescott pictures are of our beautiful Courthouse Plaza.
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Brunch out with the Prescott girlfriends...took the hats off the walls, that shade off the lamp and the feather duster out of the closet to dress us up.



Holiday time is volunteerism time for me. That is the annual Prescott Last-Minute-Non-Profit-Stocking-Stuffer Bazaar that attracts thousands of shoppers to buy hundreds of dollars of goods benefiting non-profits. The 2 organizations I support are - P.E.O. (selling the purses to the left) and International Street Angels of the World (selling angels and other things on the right) and my daughter Sarah smiling at us in front. She has helped me with this each of the last 3 years. Between our 2 booths we raised $1,600, supporting education for women and disadvantaged children !

It's not Christmas for Sally without getting together with her girlfriends from high school - Betsy and Shirley - and their families... a long tradition.

P.E.O. Christmas party included my two favorite elves, Linda and Marie.

A formal party allowed us all to get dressed up and look our very best.

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Sally stays busy with the fundraising and working to downsize this house so we can consider being full-time RVers for a while. Gregg stays busy with RV maintenance and improvements and repairs on this house in which we now rarely live. We enjoy being "home" here but we have itchy, itchy feet! We'll be off on a 6 week jaunt westward soon, then return to Prescott for a bit before heading out for another 10,000 mile+ adventure in 2011. Destinations unknown this year - we'll just see where the road takes us...