GREETINGS JANUARY 2025
|
In case you're interested, in last year's newsletter ..... Highlights of 2024: We've been trying to get in some travel to broaden our horizons and see friends and family. There were several trips that brought us to new places as well as old familiar ones. In April, we traveled to west Texas to visit Deb's cousin, Jennifer Moreland and husband Bill. They are excellent hosts. We enjoyed our stay with them on their ranch, where they raise grass fed beef. They live just north of Austin (and south of Dingdong) in an area that was close of where the total solar eclipse would pass. (For us, eclipses are a great excuse to hit the road).
| |||
|
And we
thought that since we were halfway to Louisiana, we might as well visit
Deb's family in Baton Rouge.
Cousins Cary and Donna Saurage organized a cousin get together. It was
wonderful to see all of Deb's
cousins who live in the area as well as our nephew, Steele Pollard and
his family.
Subsequently, we dropped into New Orleans to visit our friends, Sissy Wiggin and Jim and Jolie Hobbs. We caught a day of the French Quarter Festival, which was wonderful. However, news of that event has spread to the tourist industry and it's much more crowded than even a few years ago. | |||
| Later in April, we drove to Tucson to visit our longtime Canadian snowbirds, Rick and Yvonne Green. It's always fun to get together. It feels like our conversations pick up where we left off the previous time. We like to go out to hear live music in Tucson and hike or ride our bikes on the trails there. On the way home we popped in for a quick visit with Saskia and Andrew in Flagstaff up in northern Arizona. That is a scenic area at a similar altitude to Santa Fe, a great place to cool off in summer and ski/snow shoe in the winter. | |||
|
In May, we flew to the Bay Area to visit long-time friend Barbara
Jacak and
hubby Ted Laurenson. It was a week of
good food, great company and a few days in the Napa valley
for wine tastings.
The view from
their Berkeley Hills home is stunning,
Golden Gate Bridge included. Barbara had been encouraging us to visit
for
years. In October, we returned to visit
them in order to attend the
Bay Area Maker Faire. It took two days to
check
out all of the exhibits, most of them
hands-on, and see a sampling of the gadgets, gizmos and artfully crafted
solutions to problems you didn't know existed!
| |||
|
| |||
|
Once in the Netherlands, we were able to see our friends and family.
We made a special visit to Kamp Amersfoort, where Hubert's dad had
been imprisoned during the latter part of WWII. We donated
the letters
and drawings he made during this period to their archives.
On a lighter note, the Amsterdam Pride Parade, entirely on boats, was a spectacle to behold! Arriving back in Santa Fe in August after a month away, we were greeted with an epic amount of overgrown plants and out of control weeds. Additionally, the fruit trees produced a bounty of plums, apricots and apples. It took us weeks to tame the garden and process all of that fruit. Of all the problems one could have, this is a good one! | |||
| When not traveling, we continue to enjoy tai chi and biking. Deb also continues with Pilates and Spanish conversation classes. We both are members of a terrific Spanish book group, where good food and camaraderie are as important as the reading. Hubert is still active at the Maker Space, where he can weld, braze, use laser cutters and 3D printers to create many useful(?) items. He's on it's board as well as being on the board of the Santa Fe Alliance for Science. The Alliance provides support to the public schools with hands- on science demonstrations, math and science tutoring and science fair judges. In his spare time, he works one day a week at Los Alamos Labs and serves on a city committee that's attempting to improve bicycle infrastructure. | |||
|
And finally, the whole gang was here for Christmas, all doing well.
Saskia and Andrew now in Flagstaff, and Niels and Tyko in Denver.
| |||
|
Wishing you health and happiness all this year, | ||||
| home |
back |
