As you may recall, we spent our summer traveling a loop through Idaho, Montana and Canada.  The reason for the loop back to Washington is that Max chose to have his 10th birthday with friends and family in Everett, Washington. People often think that we've given up being around friends and family by traveling.  We may not see them as often, but then we didn't see them that much anyway with our busy work, school, and daily life schedule.

Cheryl and Max went to the library and checked out a book with 150 birthday games.  Boy, did we have games!  In this game the kids smear Vaseline all over their face then push their face into a bowl full of cotton balls.  The one to have the most stick onto their face is the winner. Later that day I heard that the faucets in the RV park's restrooms were real slippery, yuk.  Apparently there was Vaseline on everything.

Max had a great time. It was a rare sunny day in the Pacific Northwest, and a great opportunity for a battle in the pool.  The birthday is over and off to San Diego we go.

We had ordered our mail to show up at Medford Post Office and so we picked it up that morning.  All of our mail goes to a Texas address and once a week we call and have our mail sent to General Delivery, in care of a post office where we are.  The Escapees RV Club's mail service handles mail for about 25,000 RV'ers and a few on yachts around the world.  You might wonder why I'd mention this now, but the timing was very odd.  Cheryl had ordered a book to read to the kids and it was in our package of mail that morning.  The title of the book is, "The Thousand Year War in the Middle East."  This book provided us with the history of the on-going turmoil in the Middle East.

. We planned to be in San Diego the following weekend for the hydroplane races and were surprised to see that the race was still on.  Our trailer is parked at "Campland on the Bay", (where the arrow is pointing in this picture.)  San Diego does not promote the races like they do in Seattle.  The races are not broadcast on TV or the radio.

In Seattle the races are a two week event with parades and pageantry all around the Puget Sound.  Thousands of people line the beaches, boaters put in the day before the race to avoid the massive crowds.  The race is broadcast on the TV and radio coverage starts early in the morning with reports on every detail you can think of.  Here there was hardly a crowd.  The events of September 11th had some impact, but locals said it was a fairly typical race turn out.

We stayed in San Diego for a full two months, our longest stay in one place since we began to travel three years ago. During this time we went out for sailing lessons, went kayaking, the boys took swimming lessons, Max and Ed took a harmonica class at San Diego State University and the boys joined the local flag football league.

Mitch really got into football.  He'd shoot through the line like a rocket to pull flags.

Here's Max and his team.

One day after practice we were approached by an Italian woman.  She was looking for a few kids to model clothes for a new catalog that would be distributed in Europe.  The brand of clothing was Champion and Max was one of five kids chosen.  They would be filming the boys playing football, wearing selected Champion clothes.  We met at the park and the kids put on their selected outfits. As they were waiting around, the kids played catch with a football.  Cheryl warned Max not to get the clothes dirty, but the photographer told her not to worry.  The next thing we saw was mud being spread all over their faces, arms, legs and new clothes.

Five kids played football, kicked field goals, ran, rolled, tackled, threw and caught football for two hours while the photographer ran along and snapped pictures. But, you know what the kids liked the most?  They each received $200.00 in cash for playing football.

Max kicking a field goal

  Mitch became an odd sight around the RV park.  He's at an age where he likes to build and redesign stuff.  In this case he bought a small wheel, a length of 3/8" bolt stock, and a few nuts and lock washers at the hardware store.  He took off his front bike wheel and created this.  He rode it around for weeks before I put the regular wheel back on so that I could load his bike onto the rack to travel again.

Our weekly, Wednesday morning kayak outing on Mission Bay.

Here we are at Kenshi and Terumi's house.  Kenshi is the interviewer and American correspondent for NHK Public Broadcasting in Japan and is one of the guys who made the RVing Lifestyle documentary about us.  We enjoyed seeing him again, meeting his beautiful wife and some of their friends who stopped by. We also watched the documentary that was made and he translated the Japanese narration for us.  We were really impressed with the film.  I hope that a lot of people get to see it.

Do you remember our RVing friends who like to fish in Idaho near Yellowstone?  We met their daughter's family last summer, They live in San Diego and had us over for a great dinner one evening.  The following weekend, Cary ran in the annual triathlon. Here she is crossing the finish line.  Her time was just seconds under one hour, which put her in first place for the non-professional category.

Here's a picture of Cary, on the right, talking with a friend.  The gal in the yellow represented America in the triathlon at the last summer Olympics in Australia. Cary was just four minutes over her time.

 

And now for this month's Mystery Location Contest.  No clues, just a picture Where is this picture taken? Be the first to identify the location of this place and win!

 
 

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