Seedy Los Angeles

We have been to Los Angeles and surrounding area two weeks in a row. We were in downtown LA today. The orange building is a homeless mission. At noon, people started showing up and leaving with one cardboard box each. We assume it was groceries. The "no sitting" signs were posted all over. But we did get to see the skyline, and some very interesting sights. Last week, we went up the coast, partly on the "PCH", Pacific Coast Highway. We looked to the right and saw orange groves, and looked to the left and saw the ocean.

Windows

John was busy this week. He replaced 2 windows. One in Jes' room and the other in the bathroom. He did good! Notice our neighbor's house with the new paint job. Pretty?

Wax Museum

I spent the last week with Jes in Springfield. We went to the Hollywood Wax Museum in Branson. We also went through the Mirror Maze. It got very annoying, and we were happy when we finally made it out! We had a good time all week, got lots of errands accomplished, and had lots of laughs. But, it is time to go back to work. We are headed to LA this week. First drop, Costa Mesa, final drop Riverside. I'm tired of being chilly so 80 degree weather will be heavenly.

It's not salt

Yep, it's not salt this time. We were in Wyoming on I80 between Rawlins and Cheyenne on Saturday. They closed a portion of the highway about midnight and opened it about noon Saturday. They do a really, really good job of cleaning the roads. By the time we got to go through, the road was clean. The news on the CB was there were so many wrecks and about 12 inches of snow, they closed the road.

We are off this week. I'm going to see Jes tomorrow, and John is staying home and putting in one or two new windows, fishing, and whatever else he wants to do.

Do you know what porcine serum is? Pig Blood. We delivered 6 pallets of it last week. Frozen in 1 gallon jugs.

Holding his breath

This week, we are back in the Sacramento, CA/Sparks, NV area. We saw 33 wild horses today, in about three separate herds. They weren't as close to the road as last time, but they were in the same area. Two of them were young ones, and one had to have been pregnant.

We wanted to show everybody the road construction I talked about earlier, going over Donner Pass on I80 in California. The first one is John holding his breath and the steering wheel at the same time. The second one is what we see thru the windshield, third is the wall whizzing by, and the fourth one shows how much room we have on the side. This is not a fun run!!!!! We have to drive it going to Sparks from Sacramento, back to Sonoma/Napa Valley to pick up cheap wine, and then back over it to go home. The construction should be completed sometime in 2010 (after winter I'm sure).

Okay, I just uploaded/downloaded (whatever) pics and they came up last to first. I cant figure out how to move these things around.

Salty Utah

This is the Bonneville Salt Flats in northwestern Utah. It is about 150 square miles and the salt is six feet deep in some places. (That is not snow, its salt!) This is where land speed records are made. Cars (or some version of them) have gone over 600 MPH there. Also, part of Pirates of the Caribbean was filmed there. We got a picture of one of the salt mines, but we didn't see the pepper mine to go with it.

Razor Wire

We were in Oakland, California one day last week. We needed to park somewhere for about an hour to wait for our unload. The streets are impossible small for big trucks, but we were lucky and found a street that had parking (for cars) that was suitable for us. This is after exiting the freeway and having to make a left turn that was nearly impossible. I was driving and I was too close to both sides of the concrete wall, and had to reverse and start over, while holding up traffic. John was really afraid we were going to have to reverse all the way back up the ramp and onto the freeway. Luckily, with John out in the street helping, we made it around the corner and parked on this street. It would have been a beautiful place to park, except for the razor and barbed wire separating us from the water. This is on an inlet of the San Francisco Bay. There were some people having a sailing lesson, lots of walkers, bike riders, fishermen. Really good people watching, really hard driving.