October 28, 2000, part 2, Doug's place.
From Chico, CA, we just drove to St. Louis, MO, to visit son Doug & family, only stopping to have some maintenance done on both the truck and trailer. Oh, and of course we stopped someplace every night. Truck stops, behind the Cracker Barrel restaurant, Wal-Mart parking lots and other expensive RV resorts like that. Why pay to park for 10 -14 hours when we don't need any of their facilities? We're self-contained, and so long as we can dump the used water at a truck stop or highway rest stop and get fresh water loaded, we're fine. Besides, the cost of fuel got as high as $1.99 per gallon! Nearly $1,000 in fuel alone to get from CA to MA. But in the overall scheme of things, the higher cost of fuel has a minimal impact on life as we live it.
When you have two pictures and can't decide which is best to use, use them both! This was during a break in the action at Doug & Kerry's house when the girls were giving us a peek at a duet they're working on. As I recall, it is a piece by Mozart, and has some pretty tricky parts. In one place, Holly was playing a F natural that should have been an F sharp, or some minor difference like that, and Kerry was able to hear the difference and point out the place where a change was needed. Amazing to us! But what a privilege to be able to see how the girls spend so much of their lives.
And while they're being home-schooled, it doesn't in any way seem to make them any less "kids". It was a joy to watch them playing together for long periods of time in harmony with each other. I caught the big grins while we were cruising the campus of Principia College where Doug and Kerry met. Kerry was auditioning for a soloist position in a church there. She has a beautiful voice, and we got to hear her again on Sunday morning as she was substituting for a vacationing soloist. Next on the agenda was the annual stop at a local "U-Pick" apple orchard. And no, they didn't let me drive the tractor, but that is the kind of tractor I'd learned to drive on in 1949. Fun to see how much of the tractor I still remembered. It was pulling a wagon built especially for hauling customers out into the orchard and picking them up again.
Since the price of picking was so much per bag, no matter how full, it was fun to see if they could fill the bags clear to the top without tearing them. And since we'd been encouraged to "test" the apples before deciding which variety to take, we all made sure we did. Now, on the right, I'm not certain that chucking the unwanted rotting apples from the ground at each other was part of the program or not. But Holly made sure it was. And if you look carefully between Doug and the left edge of the picture about the level of his knees, you'll see the airborne apple. She just barely missed him, and it really wasn't safe to turn your back on anybody the rest of the day. Great fun for all of us.
The beige part of the building to the right is Doug's shop. The showroom/front office is the part under the sign, and the other six glassed sections are doors into the shop.
Doug's standing in his paint booth, (which lives behind the showroom/office area) and the picture on the right shows what they do in there. That jeep in the background was pretty exciting. The before pictures of it showed just a rusty hulk that wouldn't have caught my eye at all. They'd pulled the body off, completely stripped it, rebuilt the frame to accommodate a new big engine which they'd built for it, and were in the process of putting it all back together when we saw it.
On the left is a 1959 or 1960 Bug-Eye Sprite which is undergoing a complete restoration. The car cost about $1900 new, and when they're finished with the restoration it will have cost the owner over $50,000, if I have my numbers correct. In the showroom is a '55 Chevy that will have cost its owner over $100,000 by the time it's finished (and I have the numbers right on this one), and if you look carefully, you may be able to see the purple "ghost" flames on the black hood and fenders. The Harley-Davidson show chopper was a down-payment for another hot-rod, and the yellow car is another work in progress. The red/black Mustang is finished and Doug is storing it for its owner. Beautiful work.
I couldn't resist another shot of the Harley. And a handy thing about having a son with a shop is getting Moby Dick's door to stop making so much wind noise! The boss himself fixed it for us, and it sure made a difference.
Well, there's a saying that the cobblers kids go barefooted, but in this case it's not true. Doug drives the shop truck, and this is Kerry's car. And again, if you look closely you can see the lighter color red on the front of the car, with the darker on the back, and ghost flames in between. The extra-fancy wheels were another trade for some work, and are actually worth more than the rest of the car they're currently on!
It was one of those weekends where suddenly it's over and you feel cheated. But if we were going to be in New England in time for Barby's mom's 87th birthday, we had to get back on the road.