Joan on the Road...of Life

We had planned to head out for Northern CA this week but for a couple of family reasons decided to stay put for a month more in Hemet. I'm going to take a two week trip to visit my parents in Gurnee, IL, famous for Gurnee Mills and Six Flags. I grew up there so this is my time to visit with friends and help out Mom and Dad for awhile.

This required getting my rolling suitcase out of storage (what good does it do me there?) so we spent the day driving to Irvine where we lived for 27 years. I must admit to feeling a bit nostalgic today. It was a beautiful, balmy spring day and I recalled so many happy days in this lovely town. But I didn't reach the point of thinking I'd like to live there in a house again. Just...nice place to visit.

We exchanged my electronic keyboard and stand (that I haven't played for 3 years) for the suitcase which we'll store under the bed on top of the watertank. In our 32' there really has to be a special place for everything. To keep the suitcase with us, something had to go. We also took our old TV (remember the remodel) and donated it to Goodwill. Our remodel looks so good we figure nobody would want to go back to the TV over the dash.

Lunch time took us to one of the many outdoor foodcourts in Irvine. This one in the Jamboree Center had Indian, Mexican, Persian and Japanese restaurants. The outdoor seating was very crowded so after getting our tacos we asked to share a table with a young man. We introduced ourselves and spent an hour talking about the RV life. Turns out he just bought a popup camper and looks forward to someday being on the road. We had a great conversation and enjoyed recalling a few of our adventures. We topped off our lunch with some Moose Crunch from the Harry and David store.

Here's our lunch setting. The outdoor eating area is behind the the waterfountains.

Last stop was our accountant to finish the tax package. (Usually we do it all by mail, but we were in the area.) That took us to south Irvine and the construction going on just blew us away. Houses, shopping centers, business parks...I didn't think there was still space for so much building. Randy, our accountant, told us about a new development out in the eastern hills where the cheapest house is 3 million. We're reluctant to check out what our house would sell for now...probably a couple of hundred thousand more than we got in 2003. Well we don't regret that as we've had 3 great years on the road.