Laguna Beach sans photos

We started our day with lunch with Paul and Carol, RV friends with whom we enjoy crossing paths (see earlier post).  Our lunch at Nick’s South was excellent even with the special modifications both Carol and Anna Lee requested.   We spent a lovely afternoon catching up since we last met in June.

Back at our motel we met with Mark and Ellen.  They were the ones to give us the impetus to take this trip.  Our purpose for going down the Southern California coast was to see the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach.  But first we took the free tram for a lovely ride along the coast watching the ocean view and interesting homes.  We returned to another Nick’s for lunch, not as good this time but compensated for by wonderful gelato at shop nearby.

We entered the Pageant grounds early to have a bag dinner, listen to the music and view the outstanding collection of art pieces on display for sale.  (no photos allowed within the grounds) Then we entered the wonderful venue laid out for the audiences’ benefit.

It is difficult to describe what we saw.  Act One was a history of the area, using statues, paintings (larger than life), music and dancing, tableaus, all live or painted/sculpted.  We were surrounded by art in an entertaining and creative format.  The second act was a tribute to the great paintings and sculpture of the Impressionists, Art Nouveau to the early to mid 1900s.  The flag raising on Iwo Jima stirred the heart and New Waves got everyone tapping their feet.  The conclusion was performers entering the stage, as it turned we saw that they had “entered” Da Vinci’s Last Supper, their traditional finale.  This is the 85th year and they have created a unique, educational and fascinating event.   We hope to return in a few years.

Long Beach

We were here decades ago with our young children and toured the Queen Mary.  This time we found a lovely new adventure.  But first the inn, Beachrunners’ Inn is a hundred years old and simply charming.  We were welcomed into the inn by Pat and Courtney, mother and daughter co-owners.  They treated us more like family than paying guests.  They are warm and friendly and full of excellent recommendations of places to visit and, especially, restaurants.

The Long Beach Museum of Art is a wonderful surprise.  Visitors are greeted by Big Trash Animal who seems to shout “don’t litter.”

The museum is small but with an excellent and unusual collection.  The sketches by Matisse were interesting but it was Vitality and Verve III, Transforming the Urban Landscape that challenged us with its view of our society.

 Several of the works fill walls but all are impermanent and will be painted over when the exhibit closes.

Amy Sol is a Korean American whose work evokes peaceful reflection.  The color strips are torn from wrapping paper.

Two Tales of Separation depicts two societal separations, 1943 segregated schools and 2018 separation of children from their parents.

Someone at the museum has a charming sense of humor as depicted by the creature hiding in the air vent.  

The museum has an excellent restaurant, Claire, which Pat recommended.  The forty-five minute wait was worth every second.

The Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific has a special discount price for Sunday evenings.  We and many, many families took advantage of the price.  The aquarium emphasizes the Pacific Ocean with the northern and southern areas each have their own halls.

Of course, there were penguins.

The neighborhood of Naples is on water.  We wandered around by car and again on foot enjoying the fabulous architecture.  Homes designed in modern, craftsman and other forms stand next to each other and provide a competing view with the boats in the canal.

This house, built by someone in Hollywood, is near the inn.  Note the wavy roof tiles.
Long Beach both pleased at surprised us as a destination.

Fresno and More

We spent a wonderful weekend in Fresno (yes, seriously).  The grandson of a friend of Jerry’s from when they were wee kids got married.  It was a wonderful wedding and fun to see friends from the past (not the grandparents, we get together all the time).

The next day we went into an underground garden.  Baldassare Forestiere, a Sicilian immigrant, came to the US to farm.  Unfortunately he bought land that was mostly hardpan.  A man who doesn’t give up, he dug and dug and planted his trees 25 feet down.  This is a great orange tree.

  Using hand tools, he created a unique garden of tunnels and rooms.  He carved the hardpan into bricks to line the walls.  He designed the woven tunnels so he could see if anyone entered his home.  Our tour of the gardens was great fun as well as a lesson in perseverance.

Now the “more” and a great more it was.  Our son Jeff and grandson Bennett came out for a first visit sans Bennett’s parents.  What fun and what a lot of energy.

Timing was excellent for seeing the goats that “mow” the hillside behind our home.

Bennett went swimming in our communal pool and

he played with a whirligig.

He destroyed us at a memory game and let us win at other games.

He made a new friend.  She is the grand-daughter of a friend of ours and the two children enjoyed the Powerhouse museum in Sacramento.

We saw the play James and the Giant Peach in Nevada City.

The highlight was going to SF to the Exploratorium.  Jeff was the first in our family to go there way back when he a young kid.  The original was in the 1915 Palace of Fine Arts and was quite funky (60ish).  In 2013, it moved to Pier 15 on the waterfront and filled with hundreds of items to really get your hands on.  This is a learning experience filled with fun.

 This piece of "toothpick art" took about 40 years to build and is still a work in progress.

A Flashback to Some Adventures

In June our RV friends Paul and Carol traveled through the area.  We decided to meet up in Richmond, CA.  While Richmond itself is not a travel destination, it has a strong history.  As the US entered WWII, the need for naval ships was paramount.  Richmond was the location for major ship building, both Liberty and Victory ships.  The city was transformed into twenty-four-sevenday per week industry.  With men heading off to war, women entered the work force as did African-Americans who moved from the South.

We toured the Red Oak Victory ship, the last remaining ship of this type, learning about its construction.  The Victory ships replaced the Liberty ships because they were much faster and able to outrun submarines.  They were designed to carry cargo to Europe and the South Pacific and were lightly armed with anti aircraft guns.  

We went deep into the engine room,

seeing both officer and enlisted men’s quarters,

learning about communication between ships and land

and seeing the bridge

After a delicious lunch at Assemble Restaurant , we went to the Rosie the Riveter Museum.

 The displays show what life was like in a town that was dedicated to helping with the war effort.  Henry Kaiser, who had never built a ship, was the chief builder there.  He used any man/woman power he could to build, weld and rivet his ships..  Kaiser got in the hospital business by wanting to treat on-the-job injuries close to where the work was done so workers could quickly return to their jobs.

The highlight of our day was an amazing lecture by Betty Reid Soskin , a ninety-seven-year-old African-American woman who was a clerk in Richmond during the war. 

She presented an excellent lecture on what life was like for African Americans in the Bay Area.  She is a good teacher, a captivating speaker and an inspiration to her audience.

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.