Another Year living in Amerongen's Neighborhood
As has become our habit, we start the year with two Ballard Street offerings that seemed particularly apt during the year. The captions have been modified slightly. If your paper doesn't offer this —the Austin American-Statesman dropped it for some reason — you can read it at http://www.gocomics.com/ballardstreet/. Meanwhile, the photo shows what we look like in real life.
Kai's Birthday, Oregon, and the Baker Boys
Every year a bunch of Rice chums, originally all from Baker College, have a reunion based on eating good food, playing golf or birding, and general chit-chat. This year, the reunion was in May in Sausalito, CA. As that was conveniently near Kai's first birthday, we arranged a week long trip to the Left Coast. Arriving in El Cerrito on the day Kai turned one, we were lucky to witness his first steps, which we captured (sort of) on video.
With a few days on our hands, we borrowed Claire's car and headed for the border — the northern one — to visit cousins Emily and David Grimes in Oregon. They retired from Colorado to the sparsely inhabited “banana belt” part of the coast, near the town of Brookings. The drive took somewhat longer than expected. Read more…
We returned in time to meet everyone for the Baker reunion, including visiting Rice alum, tech mogul Forest Baskett in his pied-a-terre, a beautiful house spilling down the cliff of Sausalito, with a glorious view of the bay. After some conversation, superb wine and cheese, we returned to the hotel for dinner. The next morning, we set off early to meet yet another old Rice chum, Rex Naden, and his wife, for some birding at the Baylands Park, which birders know as “the end of San Antonio road.” The birding was fun, if a bit quiet. We spotted a Burrowing Owl, an old friend from Irvine days that we hadn't seen in a while. We also photographed a Cliff Swallow in a nest. We have lots of these in Austin, but they build nests under the bridges, making them hard to photograph. After another stunningly good meal that night, we found it was time to come home, the end of a great trip. However, there was plenty of time left in the year for more trips.
September in Yosemite
We've wanted to visit Yosemite National Park for years, but somehow never got around to it. This year, we made sure we would go by making hotel reservations a full year in advance at the famous Ahwahnee Hotel. Granny jumped at the chance to come with us, as did the California cohort, so we had seven altogether. We rented a big minivan and headed for the mountains.
What a spectacular spot! Terrific scenery, great wildlife, and good food on top of that. Read more…
But wait! That's not all!
Continuing the theme of family vacations, we worked on a trip to the tropics for Thanksgiving. After considerable research and discussion, we agreed on Ambergris Caye in Belize. Despite some annoying problems with the weather, we had a wonderful time diving, snorkeling, birding, eating, all the usual. We even had some great birds right around the condo where we stayed. The full story is here.
There's still more!
Finally, the reason we're late with this report: Jim and Linda took a birding trip to Ecuador. It was in January, 2008, so we cheated a bit on the annual report this year. We hope you'll indulge us this once. Read the full report…
In Other News
Linda's mother, Lil, continues to live with us. We have found a wonderful person, Cindy Garcia, who comes four or five days a week to cajole Lil into getting up, getting bathed, and heading out for some shopping, or a visit at the Senior Citizens' Center. We have the usual number of comensals: the Raccoons are always around, preferring the area under the deck; two cats, SkinMin and Queenie; and the joy of our life, Chipper, especially when playing Frisbee in the back yard.