Hi all, It has been great to hear from so many of our friends and family who are periodically checking up on our travels via this blog. The emails, calls and posts here are a great connection to you, thanks. Below is the end paper from my sketchbook/journal; it graphically shows our trail, each dot being someplace we have spent the night. When we were visiting Xi's cousin in San Diego, we were the farthest we will be on this trip from our home. We have begun to head north and toward the end of this week, we'll turn east. As I write this, it is a balmy 62 degrees just outside San Fransisco which we will be tomorrow.

We spent 6 days house sitting (house mooching?!) at the beautiful L.A. home of our friends Fred and Jo. It was a great home base while we explored the area. Here we are sitting in our favorite room, the patio. The weather here was beautiful and sunny with daytime temps in the 70s.

"you can't miss it, it's the only house with a ginat cactus next to the garage!"

We spent a day at Malibu Beach, one of the most famous surfing beaches in America. We watched the surfers, spent hours body surfing, listened to the many different languages being spoken by the tourists, and watched these para-surfers. They had a controllable parachute-kite attached to their belts and would zoom across the surf at high speed doing tricks.
After paying a fortune at a parking ramp, we decided to park our car on the side street. We set the alarms on our watches and loaded up with quarters for the meter. S was the first one to go add quarters to the meter. When he got there he found a ticket for $50 under the wiper blade. It stated that it was illegal to park on this side of the street between 12 and 3 on Tuesdays! Here is the sign that was suppose to let us know this important information, think it's worth fighting?!

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art or LACMA was awesome. Here Xi bathes in one of her favorite artists' works, David Hockney!

Somewhere in Utah, we took a rock in the windshield. Fortunately our time in LA allowed for a relatively painless (except the deductable!) replacement.

We are seeing some wonderful things being transported on the roads and rails of the country. Here, a double trailer of lemons heads to market or a processing plant in central CA. We have seen similar loads of plum tomatoes, almonds and garlic.

Q is most happy when he has a jar of pickles in front of him!

Somewhere it is written 'thou shall not covet the Viking convection/range of thy neighbor,' but I do anyway! I have loved cooking on this baby, especially after cooking so many of the summer's meals on a 2 burner LLBean propane camp stove!
Ivo suffers the natural consequences of her actions after putting a handful of sour skittles in her mouth on a day hike.
Words cannot describe what it was like to spend a day hiking in Sequoia National Park among hundreds of these beautiful giants.
We did a 6 mile loop through the largest grove of giant sequoias in the world. We have found that in nearly all parks, once you leave the paved trails behind and hit the back country, you nearly have the park to yourself. We saw a black bear on this trail too.
Many of these healthy trees have hollowed out bases that you can walk into. Here we stand inside a tree looking out!
OK a bit corny but we did it anyway
I know this shot is a bit washed out but it shows the scale of some of these trees, the family is in the center.