Kansas

Thursday, October 22, 2009
We drove to my daughter, Erika's, house in Douglass, Kansas just outside of Wichita. We arrived late at night so we pretty much just went to bed. Friday we went grocery shopping so Sienna and Marriah (my granddaughters) and I could cook all day Saturday. We made smoothies for breakfast, pizza for lunch, and for dinner these cute little mice baked potatoes, a fish dip for fruit kabobs (it looked like a fish), sweet and sour chicken, and raspberry cheesecake. We were in the kitchen all day long--great fun.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

We went to Church with the "fam". They have a very nice ward and we enjoyed all the meetings. Erika took us with her to the New Family Search class which Utahns didn't have yet.

Monday & Tuesday, October 26 & 27, 2009

Erika wanted me to help her design and plant a perennial bed. First, however, we had to amend the soil. Here we are hauling bales of peat moss to the hill where the bed would be. Then the four of us (we enlisted the help of Randy and her husband Rodney) put five front-end loader loads of mulch through their chipper-shredder and spread it on the bed. Rodney then used the tiller on their tractor to till everything in.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Now we had to select what plants we wanted to use. Erika has her own nursery--sort of. Rodney bought all the plants at a closeout.

Now we had to haul all the plants to the hillside.

Next, we had to place the desired plants where we wanted them for our design.

Now the planting begins!

The kids came home from school and had to check out our progress.

Alas, it started to get dark and the rain started.

Erika would have to finish the planting without me.

The Gulf Coast

Tuesday, October 20, 2009
We went swimming with the manatees at Crystal River, Florida.

The manatees have algae growing on them. They love to have you scratch their back and scratch all the algae off. I had a baby and a mama come to me. The baby's skin was nice and soft and smooth. The mother's was wrinkly and tough.

You can kinda see the manatee in front of Randy.

When Randy got back in the boat, he had algae under his fingernails from scratching the manatees' backs. Afterwards, I thought that I just had a small taste of how the Millennium will be when the lion shall lie down with the lamb. We will have that kind of relationship with all the animals during the Millennium.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

We drove through New Orleans on our way to the Baton Rouge Temple. There are still many buildings that need to be torn down from the damage of hurricane Katrina.The Baton Rouge Temple.

We made it to Houston in time to attend the last temple session at the Houston Temple.
The Houston Temple.

Thursday, October 22, 2009
We drove to the Dallas Temple and attended a session. It is quite unique--multiple spires and three entrances to the rear of the building.

Florida

Monday, October 12, 2009



We left Randy's sister's in Atlanta in a terrible rainstorm. Randy got soaked hooking up the trailer. Then when we were traveling on the freeway, several cars pulled over (I guess their wipers couldn't handle it) the rest of us slowed to about 30 mph and turned our flashers on. This was the worst rainstorm either of us had ever driven in. When we finally drove out of the storm and reached the Florida/Georgia border, the temperature was in the 90's.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009
We drove to my brother's in Longwood, just outside Orlando. REALLY hot and there was no way we could run our air conditioner so we had to move into his home to stay the night.

Wednesday, October 14,2009
We drove to Dixie Crossroads near the Kennedy Space Center for lunch. They have really good rock shrimp which are like little tiny lobster.

Randy's too full to do anything but nap.

Now off to see the Kennedy Space Center.

This is a "G" force ride. Randy was queasy after. There was no way I was going on it!

Thursday, October 15, 2009
This is the lake my brother's house faces. We paddled around it for a while and saw some fish, turtles, and ugly Asian ducks.

That night, Barbara's mother came. She and Barbara were flying to Moline, IL the next day to see Barb's brother for the weekend.

Friday, October 16, 2009

I'm sorry, but I can't match the text up with the pictures. The blog will not cooperate.

We drove to Deseret Cattle and Citrus Ranch. It is owned by the Church and is the largest working cattle ranch in the US.

This is the visitor's center.

This is a 14-foot aligator that they killed in the citrus grove.

This is a 7 foot rattlesnake skin that was killed on the ranch.

This is Sister Smith, our tour guide. She drove us around the ranch in this shuttle bus and showed us many things about the ranch.

We changed clothes in the visitor center and then were off to the Orlando Temple. It is beautiful and the landscaping is awesome. It is in a very upscale area of Orlando.

Very, very beautiful!

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That night we went to a Thai place that my brother likes. This is a whole red snapper that they deep fry and serve sweet and sour.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

We are off to Black Hammock Tours for an air boat ride on Lake Jesup. It was cold that morning so there weren't very many alligators out.

There was an alligator there!

See the tail there to the right?

This one splashed and was gone right when the camera snapped the picture.

After the ride, we had lunch at the restaurant there. Randy had a gator sandwich. I tried a bite--it tastes a lot like chicken. :-)

Then we stopped at a park that has two very old cypress trees. This is called "The Senator". It is about 3,500 years old. The other one is only 2,000 years old and is called "Miss Liberty."

Sabrina, my niece, came over and we went to dinner at a Bosnian/Italian restaurant.

Sunday, October 18, 2009
We went to the Longwood ward. The bishop there has a son on a mission in Ogden! Sabrina came over again for leftovers and we critiqued her presentation for her Doctorate degree. (SHE IS NOW A DOCTOR!) She's such a cute girl.

Monday, October 19, 2009

We did laundry all morning and waited for Barb to get home from Moline, IL so we could get a picture with her and tell her goodbye. We had a wonderful time while we were there.