Busy...Busy...Busy...

Many of you wondered and commented that it is some time since we last posted to the Blog.

Well the reason is that we have been very busy for the past few weeks.  It has made us realize that keeping a blog going is time consuming. In the movie Julie Julia, Julie’s life must have been totally consumed between cooking, writing her blog and still going to work every day. 

Our intention was to stay a week in Palm Springs and then move on into Arizona; but here we are 4 weeks later and still in the Palm Springs area.  We spent a lovely first week here and visited old friends Carole and Bob Kase for dinner.  Carole was in my first Newcomer’s lunch bunch. We had dinner the night we arrived in Palm Springs with Beth and Tom Feldman. This is their second year coming here for the “season”.  I have decided to call it that because it looks like most of Canada (East to West) and lots of Americans come here for the 3 months after Christmas.

We loved walking to downtown Palm Springs and experienced lots of funny incidents the principal one; one Saturday night a religious group was preaching at the Plaza pedestrian crossing when two 6’4” tall transvestites in full regalia, big blonde wigs, very short sequined dresses and 6” platform boots arrived to cross the road. As you can imagine the crowd was enjoying the scene – preachers preaching while the transvestites whooped and hammed it up for all it was worth.  Free entertainment at its best!

We went to the “Follies” a show in the historical old downtown Theatre.  To qualify to be in the show the actors and dancers have to be 55+, with the oldest at 81.  It is a wonderful show as all these dancers have had careers on Broadway, TV, Movies and Vegas. The MC was fantastic.

My brother John called to say he and Tess were coming to Palm Springs as it was raining in Vancouver BC and would remain raining for the next week.  So we had a great St Patrick’s few days together; it was John’s birthday and Tess and John’s wedding anniversary on St Patrick’s Day.  That night Carole and Bob took us to their Country Club for a St Patrick’s Dinner/Dance.  We also met Sue and Bill Piche, Mike and Candy Belanca for lunch; while they were here on vacation from Los Gatos.

The next week my nephew Luke (aged 15) who had been scheduled to go to Japan on a school trip arrived, also from Vancouver.  I bought him “James Bond” silky dark olive sheets; we laughed a lot at those sheets as we had to fold away his bed every morning.

We enjoyed having him; he and I played lots of tennis with new friends of mine.  We played golf one day and another day we had a camel ride in the “Living Desert” (it is a desert zoo in Palm Desert).  On a hot day we had a ride on the aerial tramway (the floor revolves as you climb).  It climbs through 5 different climates to 8,500 feet from where it is an unusual sight to look down to the desert from up in the snow.  Lots of snow up there this year.  We stayed in the snow until six o’clock.  It was too hot to come down.  

By then Tom had started our Taxes and we realized we needed to return to Los Gatos to get documents so off we set the day after Luke left.  Our engine overheated as we climbed the Grapevine just north of Los Angeles. We pulled off at a little town called Gorman and as we rolled down the off ramp the engine cut out and the steam started to flow out from under the hood.  We were lucky there was a garage with a mechanic in the town so we pushed the car the 500 yards to the garage.  We did not want to wait for AAA.  We hired a car from “Rent a Wreck” and left my precious Bluebug with the mechanic and headed on with our journey.

We stayed with Eileen and Carl who have been welcoming and gracious hosts every time we are in Los Gatos. We searched for the documents in storage next morning.  I knew they would be either near the front as we might need them or back at the back safely put away.  Lucky us they were right at the front.  We saw our 2 grandsons and they loved seeing us, it was hard leaving them especially as they had me by the legs and would not let go. Mellissa is looking well now and studying to be a teacher.

We had dinner at Maky & Mark’s; Grainne & Patrick’s; Anjali & Amit’s; Sally & Gerry’s and met Cearull & Leslie, Tony & Stella also for dinner. We did not have a free night thank you to all our wonderful friends. Wednesday I went to the Newcomer’s book club and meet lots of friends and they had an author from North Carolina attending the book club meeting.  Impressive!

In the meantime Tom got the taxes completed and filed!

Now we are back in the Palm Springs area after having collected the car in Gorman.

On Monday we will, finally, be on our way out of California and into Arizona.