California 2007 - The Greatest Vacation, EVER!!
This is Liz in front of the hot tub in Jim and Kathy's back yard.

• Saturday, March 10, 2007
  
• Arrive at LAX - Our flight was direct from Milwaukee on Midwest.
• Venice beach
• We walked out to the end of the pier and then had some lunch at a restaurant near the beach. I had shrimp alfredo with Angel Hair pasta, my favorite pasta. It was good and I couldn't finish it all.
• We wandered up the beach and it was spectacular. There are shops selling clothing and food and all kinds of things. On the other side of the walk there are artists and vendors selling things like soda-can airplanes, paintings of all kinds, caricatures, fortune telling, spray paint creations.
• We saw a black man with a colored sign around his neck singing "Jingle bells, support your local wino".
• We saw a man sitting with a cardboard sign that said "Will work for Marijuana."
• The street was very crowded and, of course, the weather was "perfect"!
  
• Sunday
• Mass at San Francisco Solano parish
• Bower Museum - Santa Ana, CA
  
• Ancient Egypt (Mummies)
• Our docent explained all about dying and death in ancient Egypt. They had actual mummies of an adult and a child. Of particular interest was the fact that in early days, there were so many mummies exhumed that one American company ground them up to make paper.
  
• Ansel Adams photography exhibition
  
• Ancient China
• Lots of artifacts from several Chinese dynasties.
  
• Laguna Beach
• 
  Above are Jim and his middle son, Dan who joined us for the time at the beach. Laguna beach is in the background.
• 
  This is Liz and Kathy with Laguna beach in the background.
  
  We walked on the beach after a delicious ice cream cone. There were lots of people out enjoying the beautiful weather.
  
• Dinner at DeKeysers with Bill and Michelle
• Jim grilled New York Strip steaks. Bill is Jim and Kathy's oldest son. He is an engineer at FluidMaster and Kathy is his boss. Michelle is a High School English teacher and lives with Bill.
• Monday
• Catalina Island
• We took a ferry from Dana Point, CA to Catalina. It was about a 75 minute trip during which we hoped to see whales and dolfins. We did see a few dolfins near the harbor near the island. Other than that, we learned that riding on the outside of the vessel was a little too chilly and windy.
  
• Yellow submarine
• This is a vessel that goes out into the harbor and dispenses fish food to attract fish. You can view them through the many large viewing windows in the vessel as my picture below illustrates. We didn't see any rare fish but did see a lot of fish. Travel tip: Don't buy the "fish food torpedos" that they sell. The fish come anyway.
  This is the view inside the Yellow Submarine. You can see lots of fish. We did.
  
  
• Interpretive center
• We intended to walk up to the Wrigley Museum and Botanical Gardens but never made it. It's all uphill and the map we had was not drawn to scale, a fact that eluded us until we were well up the hill. We walked past the island golf course and then gave up at the Interpretive center when we realized that a) it was 80 degrees and sunny and b) the Wrigley thing was still nowhere in sight.
  This is a photo I took on Catalina half way up the hill on our walk. The horse stable is in the foreground.
  Of interest at the Interpretive Center we learned that 14 Buffalo had been brought on to the island in the 20's to make a Zane Gray movie and they quickly multiplied to over 400. Many had to be transported to South Dakota to thin the herd. There is an indigenous species of fox that lives only on this island that is about as big as a small cat. They were nearly wiped out by a virus a few years ago and their numbers are down.
  
• Lunch at Armstrong’s (seafood)
• Just after arriving on the island, we ate lunch. We both had Red Snapper and we were not particularly impressed.
  
• Kathy picked us up at about 5:45 p.m. and we stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things before a dinner of pork chops at DeKeysers
• Tuesday
• Page Museum and La Brea tar pits
• We drove to Los Angeles with Kathy. She has a very nice company car, an Infiniti with a cool GPS navigation system. We found that the Tar Pits are part of the Page Museum. There are actual pits that you can observe. They are still digging bones out of several of the pits and cataloging them at the Museum as their funds allow. Below are the statues of Saber tooth Cats at the entrance of the museum.
  
  
• Dinner at “Off-Vine” restaurant in LA
  Off-Vine has a shark stuck in the roof of the house.
  
• “Wicked!” at Pantages Theater on Hollywood Blvd in LA
  This is the Pantages Theater on Hollywood Blvd. I wish I could have pictured the inside. It was incredible!
  
• OMG!! I so LOVED this play! The singing, the dancing, the lighting, the sets!! It was so much better than I expected. It was funny, it was poignant. Do you get the idea that I really, really enjoyed it.
  
• Wednesday
• San Diego Zoo
  
  
• We took the 40 minute bus tour and then wandered around the zoo for the rest of the day.
  
  Where else can you see the Giant Panda? Here he/she is!!
  
• Dinner at Mexican Restaurant
• AA meeting in Rancho Santa Margarita
• Thursday
• San Juan Capistrano Mission
  This is the beautiful altar in the chapel at the Mission.
  
• Dinner at Fisherman’s restaurant on the pier in San Clemente, CA with Bill and Michelle
• Friday
• 
  This is me with the mountains in the background in DeKeyser's backyard. I was nearly in tears having to leave this place. It's so beautiful!
  
• LAX to Kansas City
• Kansas City to Milwaukee
• Forgot to cancel newspapers
• We actually had the newspaper boy's phone number but forgot to call him. The front door was a mess with newspapers.
  
• Both sump pumps fail
• I had reconnected the one sump pump because the clamp had gotten loose down in the sump well. When I wen to the basement, I found a half inch of water. Fortunately, our basement is not finished and we have everything valuable up off the floor. The "fixed" sump pump had a stuck float and the float was stuck on the other one too. Not good to be gone when all the snow melts.....
  
• TV may have been on all week
• We have the tv cable box set to turn on daily at 5 a.m. and off again at 5:30 a.m. Unfortunately, when the time changes, these settings get all scrambled up. The TV in the bedroom was on when we got home....
• Yes, it was the Greatest Vacation Ever!! Thank you so much to the best hosts EVER, Jim and Kathy DeKeyser and their sons, Bill, Dan and Nick!
• We were also blessed during the week that Nick and his son Andrew, age 2 and an absolute DELIGHT, were there too.
• That's it for now.

Ciao, babies!!