Back Home

As we indicated earlier, we are home but we are not sitting around. There are still many interesting places to visit.  Just last Saturday, we went with a group from our community to tour Rogers Family Coffee, aka San Francisco Bay Coffee.  Before the tour, we had to don our appropriate hair coverings.

Rogers is a third generation, California-based coffee producer with an good story to tell.  First started in San Francisco, expanding to the Bay Area, and, now, located in Lincoln, CA, it was started by a family that didn’t know much about coffee roasting.  Good business sense and a willingness to try and fail led them to become a leading and well-respected, organic coffee producer who makes several delicious brews.

Our tour started with our enjoying coffee while viewing videos about the family’s history of coffee production.  Then Laura, a grand-daughter of the founder, led us through something like 600,000 square feet (the size of five Costcos, their biggest customer) of bean storage, roasting, and packaging.

The barrels contain Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee that is sold for $50.00 for 12 oz.  Jerry wanted some but Anna Lee said no.  BOO.

Laura explained the company’s commitment to finding ever more environmentally-safe and efficient ways of making coffee that was also highly rated for flavor.  This included getting rid of the plastic pods that fit in the current rage of coffee makers in favor of environmentally friendly alternatives.  This machine fills the pods.

We concluded with videos on the Rogers family’s commitment to improve the life of their growers who live in Guatemala, Panama, Mexico and Rwanda.  Then we bought a flavor that was new to us. Looking forward to remembering a nice morning while sipping our coffee.

Family Time

Bennett enjoyed having friends over during the weekend

trying out a special birthday gift

 and painting the bird house that each of the children received at his party.

 Cheryl and Dave host a grill night about once a month during the summer and we enjoyed being a part of it.  The children have fun playing while the adults get into some intense conversations, it is DC after all.

In the “it’s a small world” category, Tom, nephew of a friend of ours at home, is at the grill night and sends his hello to his aunt.

On one of our first trips to DC back in the ‘90s, we toured the Holocaust Museum.  This time we went for a specific exhibit, “What Did Americans Know?”  This powerful exhibit tells of the authoritative people in Washington who knew and tried to hide Hitler and Germany’s slaughter of Jews.  It also tells of people like Rabbi Stephen Wise, who repeatedly sent factual reports to the Roosevelt administration pleading with them to allow more Jews to enter the US and for the military to take action to try to deal with the concentration camps.

On display are thousands of articles telling of the holocaust. These were collected by students and the general public from newspapers throughout the country.

The tiles on the Children’s Wall are created by children who have had guided tours of the museum and have been given an opportunity to share their reaction.  They have been most graphic in showing the impact of their visit.

A presentation of late 1930s and early 1940s movies shows how films were used as propaganda for support for the US in the war, but, untold, was what was happening to the Jews.  One person whose call for help we were unaware of was Charlie Chaplin.  In his 1940 film “The Great Dictator,” he plays both a Jewish barber and stand-in for Hitler.  In his speech, Chaplin condemns what is happening and calls for unity in a decent world.   Later in life, when he learned of the great horrors perpetrated, his expressed regret for a movie that seems satirical.



Brag time, Cheryl posed for us with a copy of Curator, the Museum Journal of which she was guest editor for the issue on the destructive uses of ivory.

We ended our time in DC with eating, game playing and book reading, three of our favorite activities.