Long Beach, CA Visit with Family

Snow in the mountains around Visalia

We had Swedish pancake breakfast with cousin Monica Saturday morning (Feb 25^th) and got her notebook computer working!  Plan B was to take it with us to Long Beach so Uncle Leroy could fix it, but fortunately, I was able to resolve the issues (with lots of help from Google).  We left Visalia about 2 pm and headed south.  We were amazed at how much snow is in the mountains!

The Grapevine (the pass over the mountains into the L.A. area) was the greenest I have ever seen it!!  It was overcast, drizzly and 6 deg C at the summit when we gassed up, and John had to go into the trailer and get his jacket!  We stayed overnight just outside of Santa Clarita in a very busy RV travel centre/village.  No cat walking there!

Port of Long Beach

Tawny, down by the water

Sunday morning (Feb 26^th) we pulled out of the RV place and drove about 10 minutes into Santa Clarita where we found a beautiful industrial park with lots of natural landscaping and a hill down to a walking path.  We walked the cats for an hour and they were pooped! They slept all the way to L.A.!  We got to Aunt Lorraine and Leroy’s house about noon and we dropped the trailer in front of their house and put the cats in it. We drove around in the truck, looking for somewhere to park the trailer. Good thing we didn’t have the trailer with us… the Bitch (our GPS) took us to one mobile home community that had a couple of RV spots for daily rent, but we barely got the truck in there to look at them, and we would have had to back the trailer out!  The Bitch also took us to a municipal park with pool and tennis courts, but unfortunately, no RV parking.  We finally found an RV park down by the Queen Mary at the waterfront near downtown Long Beach.  We went back and got the trailer, got the cats all settled in at the RV park, then read the regulations and realized that cats aren’t allowed outside in this park, and all the green spaces were clearly marked “No Dogs allowed” so we couldn’t very well walk them around and claim we just hadn’t read the cat rule (although John pointed out the signs didn’t disallow cats…).  So we ended up driving them about 100 metres past the main gate to the RV park and walking them around a park area that led down to the water, and had lots of bushes and trees to sniff.  That worked out fine.

Sam, trying to decide if he's going to climb the fence

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We had dinner and a nice visit with Aunt Lorraine and Uncle Leroy Sunday night at their house. We were a day early getting here because I was unable to coordinate a visit with my family in the Bakersfield area, but luckily Aunt Lorraine is flexible with her dinner planning.  We did pot luck!

 

Monday (Feb 27^th) we took the cats to their walking spot then had lunch with Lorraine & Leroy at Stone Fire Grill in Lakewood.  It was amazing; the salads are very unique and very tasty.  

Traffic was horrible on Hwy 710 going to their place so we got off on the Pacific Coast Highway (partly so we could say we drove a portion of it) but it wasn’t much of a “highway” at that point as there were lights every block (all red!) so we likely wouldn’t do that again. 

 After lunch, we went back to Lorraine & Leroy’s house to visit, and we also did laundry and internet banking as we won’t have secure wifi now for a while.  There’s no wifi at the RV park we’re staying in so blogging will be late (again).  Aunt Lorraine made another beautiful dinner and we visited until after 11 pm. The cats had been alone for 12 hrs by the time we got back to the trailer, so it was play time for both of them to try to work some of the “zoom” off before bedtime.

We had hoped to stay another day in the Long Beach area, but the RV park is full now, and the site we’re in is booked for Tuesday night (and we didn’t find a Plan B) so we’re heading east.