The saga Continues

The Saga Continues

We are now in the holiday season, which includes Christmas, Hanukkah, New Years (Chinese and others), Winter Solstice, the ancient Jul, the Return of the Sun Festival, Kwanzaa and a bunch of others that I probably forgot.

Like literal snow geese, we decided to flee the storms and dark, foggy days of the Puget Sound winter and loaded our Hyundai Santa Fe headed south on December 12.  Our trio consisting of Donna, John and Ocho, our Persian cat, had 1200 miles to travel to our winter home in Desert Hot Springs, California.  To our immense relief, we experienced clear weather across Washington, Oregon and California.  The dreaded mountain snow on the Oregon-California border did not appear.  We had light traffic all the way, even in metro Los Angeles!  We stopped for only one night in Corning, California, averaging 600 miles per day.  None of us had any complaints.  In fact, Ocho is a great traveler.  He loves the closeness and attention he gets in the car.

“Why not Arizona?” you might wonder.  Although Arizona is dry and has similar weather to our Palm Springs area, we are especially fond of the many cultural and recreational opportunities here in the Coachella Valley. This is a unique area which celebrates diversity which has an active artistic, intellectual and environmental consciousness, with less of the insular attitude of the Mountain States.

We arrived at the Sands Golf Resort, where our home is located, by 4:00 pm on the 13^th and immediately were invited to a birthday party-potluck, where we were warmly received by old friends from previous years. 

We had anticipated purchasing a new refrigerator for our park model this year, but, to our relief, discovered that our old Whirlpool was operating fine, with just a bit of noise. Getting set up, unpacking and cleaning is a challenge after 8 months of inactivity.  A few challenges included purchasing a new time for our golf cart and spending over $250 restocking our food supply. 

We had anticipated transferring our DirecTV account to this location would be simple.  No such luck!  After running up at least four hours of precious cell phone time getting transferred from one frustrating automated telephone system to another, we were finally resigned to having a professional installer come out Sunday morning to do the final install.

We have spent much time getting together with old friends and meeting new ones.  John played the banjo on Saturday in one of the Sands’ monthly jam sessions and we invited by our friends, Kitty and Donna for a wonderful dinner later that night.

The weather here the first week was not warm. We even had a few days with rain and the more common wind, but we were able to wear shorts and sandals much of the time during the day.

We are now in the final process of packing our formal and casual wear for another cruise job.  John purchased two nice suits Saturday at a “vintage” clothing store and Donna will looki her best in a lovely new dress.  Wednesday, we will be boarding Cunard’s Queen Victoria, at the Port of Los Angeles for a two week round-trip cruise to Hawaii.  We will be delivering a series of lectures on the cruise.  This is a new cruise line for us on this luxury ship and we want to do our very best.

Donna is now off to her daily water aerobics. 

Look for further posts on our blog at Http://donnamollan.blogspot.com .