In eight days we did the round trip to Eugene, PUC, Sacramento, Roseburg, Marysville and home again. People think we are crazy not to take a plane and rent a car... but we have a car... and what is better than a couple of days with your sweetheart on a road trip?
Waiting in line at the US/Canadian border I saw this cute little vehicle advertising t
he checkerboard guy. When I got home and checked him out he does a lot of entertainment shows... like on cruise ships.
We had dinner the first evening with cousin Janice in Eugene... and then drove on to Roseburg yet that day. This is the second time we have met her at P.F. Changs to eat... and again failed to take her picture. The best I can offer is the horse at the entrance to the restaurant... Lovely horse, eh? Shirley wanted a photo of it so she could draw it.
Our GPS routed us on a shortcut thru the backroads from Winters thru Lake Berryessa and Pope Valley to Angwin, where we planned to have dinner with Duane and Mary Cronk. But first we had to stop for Shirley to take pictures of the sheep in Winters... which reminds me of this brunette joke.
This blonde was tired of all the hassles of being blonde, so she went to the beauty parlour to have her hair dyed brunette. On the way home she passed by a field and saw the farmer out there tending his sheep. So she stopped and asked him, "If I could tell you how many sheep you have here in this field, would you give me one of them?"
The farmer replied, "Sure." So the brunette went back to her car, took out her calculator and added up all the legs of the sheep, divided by four, then came back to the farmer with her answer.
"You have 314 sheep here," she told him. So the farmer told her, "go ahead and pick out one the sheep."
The next day the farmer came to the home of the lady and knocked on her door. When she answered the door he said to her, "If I could tell you the natural colour of your hair would you give me my dog back?"
At the east end of Lake Berryessa was this Monticello Hydroelectric Project... built in 1986 for 17 million dollars. Looked like a good deal to me!
It was such a lovely afternoon, we could have spent it all easily taking pictures along this road to PUC.
The grass was greening the hills, and the trees were starting to come into leaf. What an idyllic setting for a home... but we had to stop stopping to take pictures if we ever hoped to get to PUC before dark.
As soon as we arrived at Cronks and made our greetings to everyone, Lorne, their son invited us to join him on a walk. Perfect! After many hours in a car we needed some exercise.
He took us on a trail behind PUC on college land and told us about how his dad had been active in saving this property from being sold for development. It was a marvellous place to hike!
As soon as we returned we all went to nearby Calistoga to their favourite restaurant... Checkers. I thought Duane and Mary looked great for their age... and we had such a delightful visit together. It was just like we had never been apart. Duane, who spent most of his life in Public Relations and writing articles for the engineering and construction industry is the publisher of their local community paper... the
Angwin Reporter. Check it out to see
current photos of the wild turkeys on the hill.
When I was a student at PUC Duane came one day to the Art Department and talked to the art professors asking if they could recommend a student who could do photo darkroom work for him. That is how we met... and for the next three years I did a variety of projects for Duane... even silkscreen printing of corporate brochure covers. Above are some post card photos that Duane brought back from one of his trips to Europe. I framed them up many years ago and have had them in my office ever since.
"The best things in life come in three's, like friends, dreams and memories."
And I can say that I made some good friends, surpassed my wildest dreams and have the best memories of my time at PUC and my working for Duane and Mary Cronk.
Loved our time with Duane and Mary and Loren. Great times! We did get lots of great photos of the sheep and the lake...some stuff looked sort of familiar going through the valley behind PUC and the campus seemed very familiar. I know, there were a few new buildings but it still looked like 'home'. I was happy to see the road I used to run on every day...it had much more of an incline than I remembered. I used to be able to run that!!
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