On the Road..........AGAIN!!!

Matt and Leyla: See you soon!!!
Mame: Our prayers for a BC WIN!!!!

APRIL 11, 2008

Our drive to the Osentons in the San Francisco Bay Area was pretty uneventful! We drove straight north on Interstate 5 through the smog and freeway system of LA. At one point we counted 5 levels of freeway as we went under the first one! We started traveling through farmland with fruit trees and cattle ranches; there was one feed lot with thousands and thousands of cattle. For the next hundred miles we followed a massive cement aqueduct used to irrigate all of the fruit trees and agricultural fields. The route to Tiburon was pretty simple although we got talking and admiring the scenery and didn’t hear Marilyn tell us to take a turn so we ended up going through downtown San Francisco at rush hour and crossing the Golden Gate Bridge! It is a classy way to enter Marin County!

Bill and Francine were ready for us with a spaghetti and meatball dinner after which we started our “Hand and Foot” tournament-----men vs. women. On Tuesday we traveled to Rachel and Larry’s by the scenic route through rolling hills and beautiful farmland including an olive farm. We had a great dinner at the Gradys in Petaluma where we admired their newly renovated home and enjoyed visiting with their family and also Jason and Lisa. Francine and Bill entertained the Flynn cousins (Patti Flynn Belleci and Russ and Diane Flynn-Fox and Alan), for dinner with a meal fit for a king! The Flynn girls are doing well and we caught up on all of their family news. One day for lunch we drove into San Francisco for lunch at A16, a pizzeria with a brick oven…….Peter thought the pizza was excellent! In our spare time, we continued the “Hand and Foot” four day tournament. We had some late nights (midnight!) and the Men, in the end, beat the Women 6 games to 4 games. We’ve scheduled a rematch for the fall! Heather Grady, one of Bill and Francine’s granddaughters, is currently living with them and going to high school at Marin Catholic. We loved getting to know Heather better and we were impressed with what a fine young lady she is. Our stay in Tiburon was relaxing and enjoyable but all too short!

We left Tiburon early this morning for, perhaps, the longest drive of our trip. It’s 644 miles to Matt and Leyla’s in Portland OR. Again we drove on the interstate since we had done the coast route a couple of years ago. The scenery on Interstate 5 was green, grassy and hilly between the Coast Range and the Sierra Nevadas. Along the way we saw lots of olive trees and fruit trees which are grown on farms in the area. Another great day to drive! A hundred miles before we arrived there, we could see snow-covered, majestic Mt. Shasta (in the Cascades) looming in the distance while we were driving along with the temperature in the high 70s. The most unforgettable sight on the trip was Shasta Lake. It is a beautiful blue color but the water level was obviously very low as we’ve seen in other reservoirs. And, Marilyn did redeem herself when she successfully led us to a drive-thru Starbuck’s just off the interstate.

We crossed into Oregon a little after two o’clock with a little over 300 miles to go to Matt and Leyla’s. John Mooney will join us for our stay in Portland; he’s due to arrive at 7:30 tonight on United Airlines after changing his ticket from American because his flight was canceled. He returns to Tampa on Tuesday on Frontier; hopefully they’ll still be flying!!! That’s it for now………………more to follow when we leave Portland on the 16th to begin our trip back to the East Coast via the Oregon Trail.

On the Road Again!

Sharon: we’d love to have you with us but there’s NO room in either the back seat or the trunk!

APRIL 7, 2008

We spent several days in the California desert with the Sextons and got to see all of the Scelsas for Uncle John Scelsa’s birthday celebration. Before leaving Las Vegas on April 1, we made a quick stop at the Liberace Museum; it was great fun to see all of his rhinestone studded cars, his piano collection and his array of elaborate even outlandish costumes. One of them had a cape made of pink turkey feathers decorated with butterflies!

On our way from Las Vegas to the Desert, we drove through the Mojave National Preserve which was pretty desolate. Bea had warned us to be sure to have a full tank of gas! Good thing we did; there was almost nothing along the way. We did see a tortoise crossing the road (but no hare nearby!). We stopped in Kelso at the renovated train station, now the visitor center for the Preserve. The ranger there told us that the next time we observed a tortoise on the road we should stop and help the tortoise to cross the road to avoid being hit by a car. There are still 27 freight trains a day that go through Kelso from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Also, in Kelso, we saw the Kelso Dunes; it is so bizarre to see sand dunes out in the middle of nowhere! We were just ahead of the desert wild flower season but we could see that there were white and purple wild flowers budding. Also, lots of Joshua Trees.

As it became hotter and hotter, we saw a lake in the distance. The closer we got the more it was evident that the lake was dry; what we had thought was water was really salt deposits. Chloride is being mined here in the middle of the desert. The rest of the trip was hot, dry and dusty and, just as we saw a sign for a high wind area, we entered a valley where there were windmills as far as the eye could see. It was unbelievable, just miles and miles of white windmills lined up like soldiers. They added to the majesty of the hills upon which they stood!

Our stay in Indian Wells with Bea and Tom was a welcome respite from our weeks of driving. Once there, Tom did most of the driving and we gave Marilyn and the convertible a well deserved rest (more on Marilyn a little later!). We ate well, played a lot of cards (Connie and Bea were the winning team at the end of the tournament!), hiked in the Coachella Preservation along the McCallum Trail (the San Andreas Fault makes this a green oasis!), saw the simulcast of the Met production of “La Boheme” (Bea played Musetta in her college production of the same opera!), visited a gallery with Dale Chihuly glass sculptures like those he did for the Belagio, and met many of Bea and Tom’s friends. The weather was beautiful the whole time we were there although Bea complained from time to time about the wind. Whatever happened to the hearty girl from Iowa we had known so well! We discussed family, friends, politics and the general state of the world and reflected on our own good fortune. As usual, Bea and Tom’s hospitality was warm and generous. We got a good glimpse of how they now spend 6 months of the year in the California desert.

As mentioned before, this was the weekend of Uncle John Scelsa’s birthday. Uncle John and his wife Stella live a few miles from the Sextons. We first tried to see them on Friday night when most of the cousins were reuniting at the Dunes, a hotel in Bermuda Dunes where John and Stella live. We totally relied on Marilyn to get us there. Unfortunately, Marilyn doesn’t know about gated communities and she kept taking us to locked gates! We literally drove around Bermuda Dunes for the better part of an hour without finding the main gate and, finally gave up when all of the Scelsas were ready to call it a day!!! We did find them the next day for the birthday celebration at Mario’s Restaurant where more than 20 of us all toasted Uncle John and had a great time reminiscing and getting to know the newer generation of the Scelsa family. The Scelsas don’t often have the opportunity for all to get together since they come from the four corners of the country. It was fun for us to be a part of their reunion! We made multiple plans for a Giorgio/Scelsa reunion on Cape Cod and
all vowed to make it happen!

We’re off to San Francisco for a visit with the Osentons so it will be several days before we blog again. Until then………….