Trip to Charlottesville, Virginia

Marian, Lora Rookard and I hit the road on December 21 and headed for Charlottesville, Virginia. Our goal was to visit with our friend, Marco Harris. We met Marco when he was the Director of Operations for the University's basketball team. Lora, Juli Raines and I became good friends with Marco while he was here. Since he moved to California to do the same job with their basketball program, we have stayed in touch. We wanted to go see him, but we couldn't swing the price of the plane tickets. I discovered his team was playing the University of Virginia, so we decided to go. Juli couldn't get away but Lora, Marian and I went. We had a great time! The University campus is beautiful. The town was quaint. Marco gave us front row tickets right behind the bench. Turns out one of our Women's basketball coaches came to the game and was seated right next to us. Our families had fun watching us on television. The game went into overtime and Cal lost but UVa was in the top five so Cal did a great job.

2nd Annual Christmas Cookies Day

December 19th was the 2nd annual Christmas cookies making day for Taylor and me. We made two types of bark, chocolate covered pretzels, gingerbread men, hot cocoa cookies, cinnamon caramel cookies pumpkin snicker doodles, no baked cookies, chocolate chip cookies and chocolate peanut butter saltine toffee. It was a fun day then we went and looked at Christmas lights.

Southern Grace Merchantile

My best friend, Carol asked me to join her one evening at Southern Grace Merchantile. It is a store where merchants have booths to sell things they have created. They also offer classes in making things. We went to do a sign with believe on one side and welcome on the other. Here are our signs.

The first two are mine. Marian did welcome on both side. Here's is the green misspelled welcome. She got it right on the other side. The last one is Carol's. She only got one side completed. It was fun but the sign was much bigger than we expected. We thought it would be small. Instead it was about 5 feet long by 2 feet wide. Huge. 

Thanksgiving trip

My latest trip was Thanksgiving weekend. My sister, Marian and I went to Atlanta. We stopped along the way and ate lunch at Cracker Barrel. We stayed downtown close to where the Olympics were held.  On Friday morning we went to the Aquarium. It is a wonderful aquarium. We had scheduled a behind the scenes with the sea otters. We got to pet them and feed them. Here are our pictures with one of the otters.

The next day we visited the World of Coke. It was a blast. We did the guided tour. We got to head to the front of all the lines. I had a real Coke for the first time in about 25 years.

One thing we got to do was make pictures using the classic Coke bottle.

It was a great weekend.