Los Angeles, Trigo Mountains

Orange County Fairgrounds was a fabulous place to camp. A short jaunt to the ocean and not too far from the family! When we were in the LA area, we visited an adobe house in Long Beach with the family and I took some pictures.

We had to get the truck into GMC in Cerritos to see why it says it overheats when it really wasn’t – we ended up replacing the fuel filter (again, when we just did it a few weeks ago, but it wasn’t a GMC approved filter). Alas, that didn’t solve the problem, we’re still dinging and overheating. So we’re off to Blythe tomorrow to see the GMC people. I also got the recumbent bicycle brakes working again, and hope to bike the 20 miles to Blythe! Here's a picture of the scary bridge over the Colorado – there’s no guard rail, just a skinny pipe or two along the sides, with metal grating for a road! We’re camped here by Cibola, AZ which is south of Blythe, CA with our friends John and Jane. Ron and I caught the wild burros just off the road – these are the guys that keep us up at night with their braying! I saw the rare bighorn sheep today; they make paths with the burros along the washes that are like superhighways for hikers. Ron found his first gold nugget yesterday, 1 gram. Its been really hot here, but will cool to the 80s and low 90s.

The Minnekahta Quilt Guild has a challenge this year to design a quilt using five fabrics and cutting them into squares and triangles. The challenge is to choose coordinating fabric and designing a pleasing quilt. We used special template rulers to cut our triangles which helped me sew accurate seams. I started with the printed orange batik fabric then shopped with the quilters for the other 4 fabrics. I wanted to have groups of triangles and squares that were the same colors, rather than alternating colors. So the outside design came together easily but the center was not quite so easy – I chose the pinwheel in the center because it reminds me of the tiling job I did in the basement of the house we just sold. I worked on this quilt while we were at Rye Patch, NV, and finished it just last week. It will be shown to the quilt guild and then at our guild’s Christmas in the Hills Show in Hot Springs, where it will be voted on by viewers. I think its one of the best sewing jobs I’ve ever done, as almost every triangle tip is right on and the center of the quilt matches. I spent a lot of time free motion quilting it, which you can’t see here but maybe you’ll get to see it in person! I’ll get the quilt back when I go back to South Dakota, probably in May.