Our 2025 Continued: November and December

We love road trips and our bi-annual cross country trip provides an opportunity to see friends and family. One of the benefits of having left earlier was nice weather in Salt Lake CIty. Kitty's brother, niece, and friend Rochelle all live there. Who knew that the foliage would be so lovely there in early November?

We actually stayed with good friend Judy Rimer's daughter Debbie and family and Kitty forgot to take any pictures. We did visit with Kitty's brother briefly. Also good friends Rochelle and Art, who were amazed at how big Rockie has become. They were the people who found her by the side of the road near Shiprock, New Mexico.

Next stop, Las Vegas. We have many friends there, but Marc and Brenda Jacobus have room for both us and Rockie. They tell us we need to give them only a 45 minute warning before descending on them! Plus Marc has been friends with both of us since Boston days in the 1970s. It is always good to see them.

We got to spend a little over a week in our San Diego home before we had to leave for the Fall Bridge Nationals in San Francisco. Time enough to do laundry. Our condo was in great shape since we had lent it to the children of friends who had treated it well.

Bart did the drive in about 7 hours. We had dropped Rockie off at her sitter the day before to be sure we could get there in one day. Since we were driving on Thanksgiving, we were not surprised that the traffic going to Los Angeles was bad. However it got better after that. We got to San Francisco in time for a lovely Thanksgiving meal with our San Diego friends, arranged by Carol.

The bridge went well, Bart finished second in a major event. That plus other low overalls meant he collected over 150 points, finally getting ahead of Kitty for the year. Kitty had just a 5th and a 9th, so collected fewer points.

During the tournament, we got to spend an evening with Kitty's nephew Chase and family in Oakland. They have moved to a larger house since our visit in January and their son Kieran is so much bigger! Tay and Chase have an outdoor movie viewing venue in their garden and we were there for movie night.

On the Monday after the Nationals we drove down to Palm Springs for our anniversary tournament.

We celebrated three years together! It was at this tournament in 2022 where we got together, although we celebrate our first kiss on December 8 as our anniversary.

Kitty and Lynne were perhaps a bit bridged out as they did not have much success while Bart's team finished first and second in their events.

So Kitty and Lynne took a day off and played tourist by taking the aerial tramway ride up Mt. San Jacinto. They timed their descent for sunset and were rewarded with wonderful colors. The next day they won the team game with Bart and Mark Perlmutter.

Back to our San Diego condo for the Christmas season. Lynne hosted a potluck on Christmas day for her friends and it was great as usual. We played a fun trivia game called Taboo.

We went up to Balboa park to enjoy the lights there which was only OK. The Botanical Garden lightscape was fabulous as always. We finished the year seeing that with Rick and Carol Gold.

We can't believe how much we did this year! Kitty's New Year's resolution is to start writing the next one at the beginning of December!