Part of our 3-month vacation this year has been our planned visit of family and friends while we are staying in Oceanside. We call it “The Reunion Tour”.
We are blessed that son Tim and wife Shanon love our dogs and love to visit our RV when it is parked at the beach in Oceanside. So, we have planned for many months for them to babysit the RV and the pooches while we spend one week hopscotching between acquaintances in So Cal, spending a day with each and catching up on the lastest family and life news.
We started the Tour with a nice afternoon of snacks, drinks and chats with Charlie’s brother Fritz and his wife Terri. We were going to do a sleepover at their home in Newhall, but they opted to come down to Oceanside to beat the heat. We had a great visit.
The next day we headed up the freeway(s) to Monterey Park to visit my brother Terry and his wife Kay. They have lived in this suburb of Los Angeles pretty much their entire lives (they’re both in their 70’s now) and in the same house for the past 50 years, I think.
On the way to their house, Charlie and I slowed down and gandered at her old home in Alhambra, my high school (Mark Keppel) nearby, and the three houses in Monterey Park where I grew up many years ago.
The city has really changed; mostly Orientals live there now.
We had a great visit with Terry and Kay and my sister Kellie, who came up from Irvine to join in the get-together. That night my brother treated us to a very expensive meal at the Northwoods Inn near San Marino. I had a Porterhouse steak that was a big as a bicycle seat. Very good.
It was neat to see my brother…still alive, miraculously! He’s had some health issues in the past five years and is severely incapacitated by a bad back. But, other than that, he seemed to be in fine fettle. I am so glad that we had the chance to visit him in Monterey Park, because I doubt that he could travel out to the Nevada desert to our home.
The next day we headed 100 miles southeast to our old stomping grounds in Murrieta, where I had a dental appointment and Charlie had the chance to visit with one of her BFF’s, Jeannette Bosanko. That evening, we had a fine dinner at the Bosanko’s home in Bear Creek, and had a chance to catch up on all of the gossip about everyone in the golf course community where we lived from 1988 through 2018. The next morning, we took them to breakfast at the new Black Bear Diner restaurant in Murrieta, where I had my usual Chicken Fried Steak and Eggs extravaganza. Excellent, as always.
While in Murrieta, we had the chance to visit with some old friends. I had breakfast with some old golfing, poker, and bowling buddies, including Curly Morrison, who is 92 and still going strong. Curly was an All-American football stud at Ohio State, played in the NFL for George Halas’ Chicago Bears and Paul Brown’s Cleveland Browns, was the first “color” analyst when pro football became televised on CBS, co-invented the “instant replay” videotape technology, helped found the NFL Alumni charities, and was instrumental in obtaining health benefits for the retired NFL players who helped develop the League as we now know it. Curly is a great character and it’s always fun to be in the same room with him, listening to his stories.
We also had the chance to visit with Brenda Jenkins, whose husband and our great friend, Lonnie, died earlier this year. They are one of the founding property owners in Bear Creek…just wonderful people. Also, we visited with Marilynn Robinson, another of Charlie’s BFF’s from years gone by. She has an 84-year old boyfriend who is helping nurse her through a fractured arm.
Getting old is a bitch.
Our next Tour stop was my sister Claudia’s house in Temecula. What we didn’t know was that her house was EMPTY of furniture and goods; she was in the process of moving to a new house in the Harveston subdivision on the other side of town! So, good relatives that we are, we ended up helping Claudia and her man, Ted, move the last stuff out of her “old” house before escrow closed in three days.
So, our Reunion Tour got modified a bit, as we put in 2 to 4 hours per day over three days, ferrying household possessions five miles down the road in Ted’s pick-up truck. Finally, by Thursday, the deed was done, including moving their 1970 vintage VW Bus/Camper and Isetta 300 vehicles into the new garage.
In between helping them, we spend a nice evening with Randy and Denise Wood at their beautiful home in the Redhawk area of Temecula. Randy cooked up some spectacular Filet Mignon, the best I’ve ever had. We spent the evening talking about his Christmas Tree brokerage business and then watch some mindless U-Tube video of a military exercise at sea. Lots of fun, actually.
Another stop on the Tour included spending a nice evening with Clark and Karin Pace, our former neighbors in Bear Creek. We played cards (which, as usual, Karin won) and Clark made us a wonderful steak dinner. They also caught us up on all of the neighborhood intrigue.
One of our planned visits, to Terry DeArmond and long-term girlfriend Barb Jarvis’ home in Temecula went awry, as Barb got an emergency call from a relative back east and had to fly out. So, Charlie and I opted to stay a night at nearby hotel, have a nice meal, and binge-watch some Netflix movies. It was fun.
Our last Reunion Tour excitement was a sleepover at George and Helen Tsimiklis’ home in Lake Elsinore, where George cooked up some fabulous barbequed salmon, we chatted about everything from soup to nuts, and their young Maltese mix dog attempted, for hours, to surrepticiously impregnate our young Boston Terrier “Baby”. No dice, but I’d give the lad an A for effort!
We’re back in Oceanside now, with another ten days of sun and fun ahead of us before cruising up I-15 to our home in Nevada.
We’re looking forward to a little rest; it’s been hectic.