You know that feeling when you are running a race, and you hit the finish line? How you sort of don’t know what to do next and feel like you want to keep running? Sort of like that!
What a beautiful home we have to come home to! What an amazing blessing to have had the opportunity to have an experience like this great trip we have just completed! I can barely wrap my mind around everything we have seen in the past 3 weeks!
Our last days were spent with Dan and Lisa up in the bay area. We drove through the San Joaquin valley from there, and stopped to buy a case of peaches, of course!! There are no greater peaches!! I cooked some up this morning and made a wonderful sauce out of them to put on top of my pancakes! Yum!
We stayed the night up around Valencia. Kinda icky there. Just icky sounding people. People who maybe haven’t had the chance to understand beauty. So Mike got in a fight with the hotel lady immediately about the pet fee. He asked me to step outside, so I did. Now get this! In the morning when he went to put in a complaint about the lady, he was informed that there was NO pet fee!! Never was! The lady was wanting cash, and would have just pocketed it! Can you believe it? It’s times like that I’m so glad I have Mike. He can smell a con a mile away. Probably because he can be a good con himself if he wants to be. <:o}
Yesterday was so funky and fun! We met Alexis, Jody, Meredith, and Troy at a Jamba Juice store in the City (LA). Then later Aaron and Gwen joined us. It was a little row of restaurants with outdoor seating, and we just got up here and there to get what we wanted to eat or drink. We just sat and visited for hours and hours…let’s see…from 1:30 until 8:45!! ha! It was pretty great. We left Aaron and Gwen to have their visit with Alexis for the rest of the weekend and headed home sweet home. We all felt sort of like Zion so beautifully illustrates here:
My poor dogs! They were so good through the entire trip. Zion had a few issues yesterday with other dogs. He barked at them and Meredith thought he might be aggressive… I thought he was a puppy wanting to play, plus a little bit of “I’ve been stuck in a car for 3 weeks” energy tossed in. I’m pretty sure I was closer to the truth. They were so happy to be home! At first it seemed to take a bit for it to soak in for them. Then Zion started running around and around and around, like his little clumbsy self (he’s so funny when he runs…he looks like a little hippo or something). Everyone slept like babies.
Here is a pic that Lisa took of us at her house:
I still need to download some video. I’ll do that later today. For those of you who have followed this, thanks for sharing our trip with us! What an adventure it’s been!
Hi friends,
We’re holed up here near Magic Mountain tonight. Michael wants to see Jody and Troy and maybe Josh from our band tomorrow. Aaron and Gwen might get lunch with us since they’re flying down to Hollywood to spend the weekend with Alexis (a forever-friend of mine since 4th grade). Hope that works out. Michael left our brand new, pretty expensive, double leash at a rest area today. I’d been feeling sort of emotional already after seeing my old house and how run down it had become, and just the whole beautiful trip and it’s emotional impact on me and the lost leash served as the straw on the proverbial camels’ back. I had a good cry.
We live in such a beautiful country. A giant country full of beautiful people. I don’t know what it’s going to look like after the upcoming election, but I’ve never been so concerned about an election before in my life. While I’m obviously a republican, I’ve had respect for different democratic presidents over the years, and other democratic officials. I’ve seen such a change recently in the democratic party though. The “left” has become so FAR left, that common sense seems to have gotten lost. There is no question that we have some serious problems in our country, but all I am hearing out of Obama is “change”, and no clearly laid plans of what he plans to do. It sounds much like how the German people followed when Hitler promised “change”. He too was very charismatic. I know that’s a pretty extreme statement. But in this time of global terrorism, how wise is it to elect a commander and chief with no military experience? Do we want them on our soil again? I am merely ranting right now, and probably should not be, as I should take the time to really address this in full. Maybe I will. I would like to send out this one plea to everyone though, no matter what your political affiliation or who you are; please please, read read read, study, look at the candidates backgrounds, remember your history..but above all: vote responsibly! Don’t just believe what you hear, especially from the media!!
Dan and Lisa have been my friends for nearly as long as I can remember. We figured out today that it’s been 20 years. Now the kids are grown and we look back together. Well, Dan and Lisa’s kids aren’t quite out of the nest yet…almost. We went to dinner with Aaron and Gwen, Brian Martin, Michael’s good friend and colleague, and of course, Dan and Lisa, in the city. I hadn’t seen Aaron and Gwen’s place until today. It’s like something from a movie; a big spacious studio with a breath-taking view. I won’t have many pics of video footage of it because Aaron doesn’t like me pointing a camera at him…it seems I did that a little too much when he was growing up. But in my defense; if you’d have seen how cute he was, growing up, you would have taken pictures too. ;o) Wonderful dinner, wonderful evening. Beautiful city. I’ve always liked San Francisco. The dogs stayed at Dan and Lisa’s with their dog, Penni. Everyone got along.
I feel a little like I’ve taken on the undo-able in keeping up this little blog site. But I want so much to keep these memories intact. Have you ever come to those places in life where you realize there have been so many beautiful moments that you can just hardly remember anymore? Where you wish you could just capture them again, to cherish them just one more time? I know that I can never capture it all. But something about this entire trip has been so absolutely magical and inspired. It seems like it was planned ahead of time for us. And I sense more strongly than usual that these moments we are all walking through aren’t just little random moments, but rather, very particular appointments in time. Each one so precious that as we walk through it, we can’t possibly adequately estimate its’ significance in the great master plan. Mine is not to figure out what it all means, or what each and every purpose is. Mine is to cherish, to hold, to remember, and to give thanks. So many thanks.
Here are some little video clips from our afternoon yesterday with one precious new little life that came into the world this past week. Little Lucas.
I’m a day behind on pictures now too. My video camera is having a hard time connecting, so I had to abandon video for a day and now I’m backed up. I’ll put up video of San Francisco in my next entry.
Tomorrow we start to head home. We plan to stop in Hollywood and stay the night. One more grandchild to see. ) Wonder what little Troy is up to!
) Wonder what little Troy is up to!
