Subsequent messages:

(December, 2002)  Husband Bill and I have been doing quite a bit of traveling the past year. In October 2001, we took a 6 week driving trip through parts of the US, as far east as Washington DC. While there, we took time to go to the Vietnam Memorial.  The name of our classmate, Medford Chrysler, unfortunately is inscribed there. We visited Washington just at the height of the anthrax scare, and post-9/11, so lots of stuff was closed down. However, we have a daughter and new granddaughter living in DC, so the trip was still pleasant.

In March of 2002, we spent a month in New Zealand, just driving our rental car all over the place. It was a grand place to visit - awesome scenery and delightfully friendly residents.

In July, we took another month to travel through some more National Parks, having gotten the park bug from our previous October trip. We hit some of the great places in Utah, then worked our way up to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons which we had managed to miss all these years. We're definitely getting into nature-type vacations now. We ended up with a week in Canada, joining some friends for golf. The weather turned very cold - 37 degrees - and made us anxious to get back to nice warm Palm Springs.

(August, 2004)  While working on the website, I decided to update my activities for this page.  We are still having a good time and getting in quite a bit of travel.  2003 saw us going to Orlando for a week to take the grandsons to Disney World, followed by a week in Puerto Vallarta (sans kids), both times to use up timeshare weeks that were about to expire and that we hadn't been able to trade for other places we really wanted to go.  In August we went to Kauai with a group of friends to golf and sightsee.  I loved the smaller island and its quaint feel.  I had spent 4 summers during and after high school on Oahu where my sister lived, and had visited Maui a few other times.  Kauai was much more interesting, although the place is overrun with chickens and roosters.  I actually went on a helicopter flight for good sightseeing.  I don't really enjoy flying, but it was worth the nerves to see the island beauty up close and/or from the top.  In the fall we took another long driving trip - nearly 8 weeks - determined to pick up the few remaining states that we had not yet been in.  We managed to do that, plus have some interesting/quirky sites to visit, located from the Internet, e.g. the World's Largest Hockey Stick, the Enchanted Highway, Paul Bunyan statues, etc. - but we did miss the World's Largest Ball of Twine as well as Carhenge!  We toured around the Great Lakes area where we had not been before.  The fall colors were lovely, but the weather throughout our trip in the more northerly states was rather cold, and put a damper on our outdoor activities.  We finished up with several days of golf with husband's Internet sports buddies in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with more pleasant and temperate weather.  We decided that future driving vacations will concentrate more on the western states - the weather is much more predictable and warmer, for the most part, and there is plenty to see and do (of the nature variety).

When we are on the road, we travel with a laptop computer.  I keep a journal of our travels and condense down the hundreds of digital photos that my husband takes each day.  We have our own website, so we keep a running e-journal for our family and friends to watch our progress and enjoy our photos on a limited basis.  It beats sending postcards to everyone, and it makes for a nice travel record for later review.

This year we haven't done too much, other than a week in Sedona, Arizona, and some hiking around Mammoth Lakes in California.  We are planning a trip back East again in October to visit the newest granddaughter in Washington, DC, and to play golf again in Myrtle Beach.  We hope to get in to see the Frank Lloyd Wright house (Falling Water) in Pennsylvania that we missed previously, and possibly a White House tour, if the world situation permits it to stay open for a while.

My husband thought I would go nuts from boredom when I retired, being somewhat of a workaholic, but it has turned out not to be a problem!!!  Between travel, golf, computer stuff, gardening, and voracious reading of totally junk murder mysteries, there isn't a whole lot of boring downtime.

(September, 2005) I'm back to working on the website, in addition to compiling reunion photos for this site and the photo CD.  We've had an incredibly busy year, going lots of places, doing lots of things.  The highlight of the year was a six week trip to Italy, Sicily, and Greece.  Because I basically hate to fly, we have to get in a lot of stuff once we get to a destination.  We took escorted tours in all three places rather than dealing with the summer crowds and unfamiliar places on our own.  The countries were terrific - learned a great deal about Roman and Greek history, intertwined with mythology.  It was hot and tiring, but quite a great experience.

I've had a lot of fun getting in contact with old classmates and receiving the photos of their lives over the years.  Putting together the CD with 1965 memorabilia was also a nice trip down memory lane.  The payoff of all the work was the wonderful reunion in August - great to see lots of people and see how they've all turned out.  Perhaps attending once every 20 years is not quite often enough.

(August, 2006) It's hard to believe that almost another whole year has gone by.  Husband Bill and I continue to enjoy good health and the outdoor life style of Palm Springs (other than a few really nasty weeks of 116 degree weather this summer!).  Travel this year has been only domestic - a few weeks foray into New Mexico and Arizona most recently.  We love the Southwest, and this year visited beautiful Canyon de Chelly in NE Arizona for the first time.  It's wonderful to see awesome things created by nature, especially if they're a bit off the beaten path and not overrun by tourists.  (We did a quick drive-in to Grand Canyon in the middle of a rainstorm and there were still a gazillion tourists!).  We're planning on a return trip to New Zealand at the end of next January with 3 other couples - a combo of golfing and sightseeing.  We're looking forward to returning to friendly New Zealand, although it's tough to think of returning anywhere when there are so many other places we have yet to visit.  If these silly terrorists would just settle down, I'd be more inclined to start traveling more seriously!

(August, 2008)  The retired bums have continued to travel and just hang out in the good weather of Palm Springs.  In February 2007 we successfully managed a golf trip to New Zealand.  We had a mix of cold and pleasant weather in the middle of the NZ summer.  We finished with a week at a rented house on the Bay of Islands on the North Island, an absolutely gorgeous spot right on the water where we could sit on the great deck and watch the cruise ships slip past.  In the summer we joined our local golf group for a 10 day outing in the Denver area where we had some great golf and a few great non-golf outings, traversing the Rocky Mountain National Park.  As of today, we are just back from a 5 week trip to primarily Western Australia.  The trip was going fine until at the mid-point I fell down some stairs and broke both sides of an ankle, ending up in the hospital for 12 days, with only a bit of malingering.  With the various adversities from this trip, we have sworn off major travel for the foreseeable future.  Guess we'll just have to tough it out in the desert!

(December, 2009) Even after last year's travel mishap, we couldn't stay home for the whole year.  I worked hard to rehab the ankle so we could be totally mobile once again.  Our major summer event was a drive up to Alaska to see some of the interior, having done the Inside Passage cruise some years ago.  We had a wonderful time with great weather and scenery (other than a lot of haze from summer wildfires) and enjoyed being able to travel highways without a glut of traffic.  The perpetual road construction/repair was a bit annoying, but was just part of the package.  We wandered a bit through the Yukon and British Columbia as well, ending up with our golf group for a 10 day outing in Kelowna, BC.  We arrived home safely, with only some minor dings in the car, having logged 9,211 miles on our foray north.

It has also been a fun year working with the reunion committee.  I went up to the Bay Area in the spring for a meeting and stayed with the Barnharts.  Mark Stephens and his wife came over for dinner while I was there - hadn't seen him in 40+ years.  This fall Linda and John Patterson came down to Palm Springs for a weekend (the Barnharts were a late cancel), and we had a wonderful time catching up on our respective lives.  It's nice to reconnect with old friends from school, and to deal with other classmates who have become friends.  We're looking forward to the 2010 reunion!

(August, 2010)  See 2010 reunion questionnaire response.

October, 2012)  It's hard to believe it's been two years already since the last reunion.  We had a wonderful time at the wonderful event.  I only wish even more classmates could attend!  I'm looking forward to the big #50 and will enjoy working with the reunion committee once again.  Meanwhile, I'm doing some updates on the web site to make it look better on today's wider monitors.

This past summer we were able to take our "trip of a lifetime" - venturing into Africa for several weeks, including 11 nights in safari camps (photographic only, of course).  We had long wanted to make the trip, but just never quite got around to doing it.  We had a fabulous time - great African people, luxurious accommodations out in the middle of nowhere, and opportunities to get very close to the wild animals.  Despite some major camera malfunctions, we still ended up with a set of great photos, a collage of which now hangs proudly in our entry hallway, along with collages from other trips.  We are so happy that we have been able to enjoy our retirement years without any major health concerns.

(November, 2015)  See 2015 reunion questionnaire response.

Check out my favorite car and story in the Events-2015 Reunion car stories and pix.

PHOTOS:

Alice & Bill at 2010 reunion