Cali: Oranges, Hollywood, and Sun

For anyone spending two weeks in California, here’s a tip: two weeks isn’t enough.

The drive throughout the state is beautiful and clear…until you hit any highway in SoCal.

The weather cooperated and we took full advantage of it.

From doing school outside…

…eating outside a bit…

…enjoying the sites of Hollywood…

…including the Walk of Fame.

And did I mention before, we ate a lot?

One of our favorite, if not our favorite stop this trip was a tour of Homeboy Industries. What an awesome outreach and community improvement venue. A must visit stop.

Walked through Chinatown and visited the California Citrus State Park, of course, eating some more.

 

Our last stop in California was the newly reopened Joshua Tree National Park.  While our whole trip was altered due to the shutdown, we are grateful to still visit this park.

 

Warmer Temperatures

While we enjoyed our few days in the snow, we were happy to enjoy the balance of warm mornings and cool evenings of Arizona and into Nevada.

The kids have finally gotten back adjusted after a long Christmas break doing school again each morning (without complaining) and then going out to enjoy our campground or the surrounding city. Whenever we get the chance, we like to enjoy a picnic lunch by the water. We had Pizza Hut on the Colorado River!

The last time we traveled to Las Vegas, we didn’t explore much with the kids, so they were looking forward to seeing the city.

Everyone had something they wanted to see:

Madison (our chef) wanted to visit Gordon Ramsey’s Hell Kitchen and Carlos’ Bake Shop.

Mackenzie (our fashionista) wanted to see the high end stores, like Louis Vuitton and Gucci (actually she wanted to buy something but that wasn’t happening).

The little ones just wanted to eat hamburgers! So we went to In-N-Out since we can’t get that back at home.

For us, we were just looking forward to the sites…

…and taking pics of and with the kids.

As we planned our monthly date, 18thfor18th, we made sure we’d be in Las Vegas.

We enjoyed seeing the city.  We looked at RVs and stopped by the Vegas Harley.

Then we spent a few hours walking on the strip before eating lunch!

Normally, we leave the strip before it gets dark, but we stayed into evening, enjoying some time away from the kids and enjoying the lights.

Before heading into California, we checked out a flea market (swap meet) the next morning. We’re always on the look out for good deals, and picked some vinyls, puzzles, and some DVDs.

Until next time…

Snow: Enjoyed It And Then Escaped It!

Driving into and through New Mexico, we were ecstatic to see the snow all over the ground and in the mountains.

 

 

We were able to enjoy the snow for a few days…

…and hiked to Church Rock in it!

We enjoyed some authentic Mexican Food in Gallup.

 

 

And, learned about the Navajo Code Talkers while in town.

Snow is fun to play in and look at, it’s not a favorite of ours to drive in.  So we (once again) changed our plans and decided to leave beautiful New Mexico a couple days early.  We drove all the way across Arizona in one day to run from a major storm.

 

 

That didn’t prevent us from visiting a few spots though.

We stopped by the Petrified Forest National Park, and while we couldn’t get in, it was on the way, so we took a chance.

 

 

Still couldn’t get in!

Visited Wigwam Hotel, inspiration for the movie “Cars.”

 

 

Stopped at a couple Harley Dealerships.

 

 

After a longer than normal driving day, we got to our campground for the next couple days, got some laundry done, and let the kids play in the little area behind our site!

 

 

Until next time…

New Mexico is Beautiful!

Did you know that northern New Mexico is at a higher latitude line than where we’re from in N. Georgia? We were pleasantly surprised with all of the snowy weather, the landscape, and topography of this beautiful state.

Here’s some of what we’ve seen!

Beautiful sunrises…

…sunny days…

…and magnificent sunsets!

And the snow; it’s everywhere!!

 

Even got some good shots of us on the road by ourselves!

 

We’ve been through this state twice but have never explored it like this before. It’s absolutely stunning.

Until next time…

Shutdown Won’t Stop Us!

We started school for the year with the usual excitement (we’re sure it’s going to be short lived).

 

 

But for now, everyone is excited, especially about the scenery and the weather.

Texas is huge and we’ve finally made it into New Mexico!

 

 

We were unable to go to Carlsbad Caverns National Park and Guadalupe National Park due to the government shutdown but we were able to do some great hiking in Lincoln National Forest at Sitting Bull Falls!

 

 

 

 

Just down this road are the two National Parks that we’re missing. I guess we have an excuse to come back!

Until next time…

Sun, Sun, Mr. Golden Sun, please shine down on, please shine down on us!

F-I-N-A-L-L-Y!! We have some sun and we are soaking it all up.

We don’t start school until next week but we still like to use our time learning, so we visited the Bureau of Engraving and Printing where money is literally printed by the millions daily!

Couldn’t take but one picture because they don’t allow phones or cameras in the compound.

Stopped at another Harley dealership too!

In order to keep our trip kid-fun and kid-approved, we caught the new Spiderman movie, and actually it was pretty good.

AND, we finally were able to go hiking.  We explored Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailways.  The kids received new hiking sticks for Christmas and we all got new hiking shoes/boots, so we were more than ready to put them to use!

We have finally adjusted to Central Standard Time, right in time to move on to Mountain Standard Time tomorrow😀

Until next time…

Old Friends and New Friends…and more rain!

It’s amazing how many friends we have in the state of Texas.  Sadly, we aren’t able to see all of them, yet we were fortunate to have a meal and visit with two families in the Dallas area.

William grew up with Ebony in Massillon, Ohio and hadn’t seen each other in about 16 years.  It was great to meet them for breakfast, meet her husband for the first time, and for them to meet our children (Ebony met Madison when she was a newborn).

Somehow, though none of us are really sure how, we connected with a family on Facebook a couple years ago, Dan and Emily Crutchfield. We have really enjoyed our social media relationship with them. They were welcoming enough to have us come over to their home and they cooked a fantastic Greek meal for us as we visited with them for a few hours.

(In all of our fun, though, we forgot to take a picture!)

The rain seems like it’s been following us since we left. We’ve driven in it and  many of our campsites have had some big puddles around it. At least our sites have been private, spacious, and beautiful, including this latest one.

We got a little reprieve from the rain to explore downtown Dallas…

Inside the JFK Memorial Plaza

30 ft Giant Eyeball

…as well as picking up two additional Harley Davidson poker chips…

…and making our daily grocery trip.

The weather report is looking sunny and warmer over the next few days and we’re looking forward to it!

Howdy Y’all!

Everything is bigger in Texas!

The signs…

…the buildings…

 

…the hats…

 

…and the Harley Dealerships!

Right on the border of Arkansas and Texas is the second most photographed Federal building (we’ll let you find out the first), the Texarkana Post Office.  The post office is separated right down the middle: one side is in Arkansas and the other is in Texas.

 

The clerk there provided us with some great information and history of the building and we even mailed some of William’s client packages from there with a special stamp (only Post Office that has two states on its stamp)

To this point, we’ve had less than stellar weather, but the sun decided to come out for a bit while we were in Sulphur Springs. They have a quaint downtown area, but are known for their Glass Public Bathrooms. You can see out but can’t see in!

 

Heading west to California will keep us in Texas for about a week.  We’ll finally start hiking in the coming days and weeks and we’re super stoked about that.

Until next time!

National Park #1-Hot Springs National Park

Up and at em early in the morning Shipley Donuts was our first stop of the day and we made sure to get our fair share.

After breakfast, it was a short ride to our main attraction for the day, Hot Springs National Park.

 

It’s amazing how warm these super heated springs are.  After dipping our hands in, we were tempted to dive right in!

Would have been nice to take a bath at the Quapaw Bath House, but at $20 a person, we decided to pass until it was just a parents’ only trip.

While in the town of Hot Springs, we took a tour of Mountain Valley Spring Water Visitor Center and enjoyed some fresh water.

 

We grabbed a few things from Walmart before pulling into the campground.

We made it in time for the little kids to ride their scooters for a few minutes…

 

…before being forced in by the rain 😦

 

So Much History and A Half Million Dollars

For about 30 seconds, the Thomas family had $520,000 of cold hard cash in our hands.  We could feel how heavy it was and it smelled just like you would think a half million dollars would smell.

It would have been nice if this was our family safe in the background, but it was inside the vault of the Arkansas State Capitol Building.

We haven’t seen many vaults before, but this one certainly was massive. The door was 24,000 lbs alone from O-h-i-o (shout out to William’s people) that had to be hoisted up to the second floor in 1912.

The Capitol Building was stunning: wall to wall and floor to ceiling marble, supreme architecture, marvelous columns, and beautiful symmetry all throughout.

Our tour guide was fantastic and extremely knowledgeable about both the Capitol Building and the history of the city, both historically and currently.

The rest of city didn’t disappoint either.

We find history, specifically cultural history, to be especially interesting.  We’ve discovered many cities have audio history tours that you can take, so of course, we did this one too.

We drove by the Horace Mann High School, which was built after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision to end segregation. It was built on the east side of Little Rock where most of the poorer black students lived as a way of still keeping black and white students separate.

Afterwards, we passed this cemetery where former slaves and free blacks, from the early 1800’s, were buried.

From there, we went over to MacArthur Park and the Pike-Fletcher-Terry home.  The park was the first city park and has statues to honor those who fought in the Korean War, as well as a statue to remember the end racial segregation in the U.S. Military.

Mrs. Adolphine Fletcher Terry was instrumental in supporting and getting non-segregationists elected to push the end of segregation in schools.

Before heading over to the current Capitol Building, we toured the Old State House…

(Macey and Gig-up recreated the creepy photo)

…which is now a museum, that holds everything from Oddities…

…to quilts woven by African American women…

…and, the dress Hillary wore when Bill Clinton stepped out the front doors to accept his first presidency inauguration.

One can’t visit Little Rock without visiting Little Rock Central High School.  If you are unaware of the history of this school, we’d encourage you to research it for yourself.

There was so much more we saw in this city, but one must come and see it!