Rancho Jurupa County Park

We spent a week at Rancho Jurupa County campground in Riverside. This nice park is convenient to many places like a dog park, and a bike trail, and air museums, and an RV surplus store. And even convenient for my brother Glen to come visit. What more could we want!It was a great place to celebrate Christmas. We had our lights lit. 3 Christmas trees on the dash and one tall one outside. We cooked a nice prime roast for dinner. A very good day.

WARMLY Enjoying the Christmas Boat Parade

We must say that watching a Christmas boat parade in Ventura, California is infinitely more comfortable than the same in the Pacific Northwest. Especially, this year!

Here Ventura Harbor has an open house with families coming to stroll the harbor, ride rides, listen to bands, shop and dine before the boats start cruising. And after the parade, there are fireworks. Lucky us! We know some Cruise-A-Home owners who have the best seat in the house to watch the festivities and Lynn and Nathan invited us aboard for the evening.

John S. from Salinas

The National Steinbeck Center in Salinas may be the best museum we've toured ever. Great information nicely displayed on John Steinbeck's life, many interactive displays for all age levels, and cuts from movies made from his novels.

Many of his stories were geographically set within 100 miles of his hometown of Salinas. We both realize that over time we have read a number of his books.

"Travels with Charlie" is the latest of his books that I have read. Enjoyed the story of him traveling in his camper across the country with his full-size poodle "Charlie".

A quote from the novel about Charlie:

"His perceptions are sharp and delicate and he is a mind-reader...I know too well is look of despair and disapproval when I have just thought that he must be left at home." Charlie's mannerisms reminded me of traveling with Pogo and now Miss Lily.

Sights from the Golden Gate Bridge

We wanted to travel over the Golden Gate Bridge just once. To admire the views from the bridge of the bay and ocean and San Francisco. Ah, well.

Best thing: sure glad we weren't riding our bikes across!

Charles M. Schulz & Charlie Brown

Alway have enjoyed the Peanuts bunch and finding us so close to the Charles Schulz museum, we took the opportunity to go check it out.

While the museum was a disjointed presentation of Charles Schulz' life and not so much the Peanut comics, we really enjoyed the statues and cartoon strips displayed. We saw tiled Peanut strips in the lavatories over the toilets and over the sinks. And we enjoyed Charlie and Linus and the kite up in the tree.

There was a tile mural 17 x 22 feet with almost 3,600 2"x8" tiles with comic strips printed on them. We liked seeing the early strips and how much Charlie & Lucy and the rest of the company changed over the years.

The picture below is a detail of the mural. Note how the artist used the comicstrips that depicted night scenes to make the dark outlines for the figures.

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Miss Lily posing with Snoopy and Woodstock.

Missing Winter Weather - nope

Was going to write about how mild this late fall has been. Since we left home just before Thanksgiving, we've had wonderful weather with little rain and temps above freezing.

But we could have had the same weather at home as winter hadn't come to the Pacifc NW. Well, that all changed this week. Though we are sorry for those trying to keep warm up north, we are happy we aren't there!

We are in the San Francisco area right now and they are in a tizzy because of the weather forecasts it getting very cold....down to 36! Huh? Nothing like the teens back home.

Sticker shock

While staying at the Elks in Petaluma and we see that just down the street tours are offered of Mrs. Grossman's Sticker Factory. How can we pass that up?

Learned alot about the company and the processes used to make up stickers. They had on display over 1100 different stickers. Rolls and rolls of stickers were shelved in their warehouse awaiting orders.

They have fun in this company. Dogs are invited to work each day. Outside the front entry are two small fountains. Maybe for the dogs to slurp from? There are also 3 outdoor kennels and a gate to an adjoining park. (Didn't see any day care facilities, though.)

On the tour they gave us a lot of stickers. Thank goodness, as I would have had just buy more! Think I have enough?

Shore Acres

Wasn't this nice! The RV park at the Mill Casino in North Bend, Oregon, offered to drive their guests out to enjoy the lights at Shore Acres. This is the 22nd year for the lights over the holidays. Shore Acres was the former estate of lumberman Louis J Simpson and is now a state park. Only the formal gardens and the gardener's cottage remain.