Here you will see a collection of photos taken from a variety of family outings and get-togethers from the past six or so years since Joe and Ruth became a combined family group. We have been abundantly blessed in the ability to travel to some degree and to have bonus checks and stock monies, etc. forthcoming just as we needed it most! We have tried to make meaningful memories with what resources we have had available. It has taken leaps of faith and stretches of creativity to accomplish many of these things, but we have grown together in many ways as we've planned and carried out a variety of activities.
Ryan, Teonei, Kandle and Kendra at NASA space center with Atlantic ocean in far rear. We took a family vacation to Orlando, Florida in 1996 due to a business training that Joe had to attend. We traveled by AMTRAK with six children (one not our own), and had two more (Teonei and Kendra) join us by airline in Florida. Along the way we stopped for two days in Anaheim to visit Joe's family and go to Disneyland. We ventured onward to Orlando and spent five days there doing the Disneyworld theme parks!
From there we headed north through Chicago and stopped for several days in Evanston, Wyoming to visit Ruth's brother and family for a few days before resuming the trainride home! It was a total vacation of three weeks and lots of bonding and fun along the way!
It did get to be rather an organized group of travelers by the time we had to load and unload ourselves and gear at several stations along the way! (Click on the train for AMTRAK website info)
Often the favorite place to go is.........HOME!
Spending holidays and special occasions together makes anytime seem like a holiday. Just getting together for a family meal and fun.
We've managed to have family get-togethers away from home as well. It's always enjoyable to get out and see something new or some place special that we'd never been before. Going across the country in an RV with Max to see church history and American history sites was an adventure of a different sort. Lots of memories!
We have entire albums (usually two per vacation) on these family travels that we have taken. From Yellowstone, to California Adventure to Disneyworld and NASA and back home again in parks and activiities near and in our homes.
The fun is always multiplied by the number of people that we can include as our family grows!
This trip managed to include extras on the train ride (Cheethirala's rode for an hour with us), extras at Disneyland (Max was there in RV and joined us for a day with Eva Solomon); and Susie and Tammi spent one day with us there as well as Mike and Amy trading off for the evening. By sharing our passes we were able to allow more family and friends to enjoy the parks while we enjoyed the hotel and "strip" shopping. It was a blast to have so much family participate in the fun.
The new park had it's drawing attractions. We went on the screamer only once, but the Grizzly Bear run and the Soarin Over California we visited as many times as we could possibly get through the fast tic
lines! They were awesome and very memorable. We also splurged and spent the five days in a glamorous hotel right at the gates! WOW! Never even used any of the three pools, although some of our group did! We were hard pressed to see it all since so many or our group were there for the first time.
Gettysburg, Amish communities in Pennsylvania, The Statue of Liberty, The Liberty Bell, Nauvoo and the pageant, the birthplace of Mark Twain, Palmyra and the sacred grove, homes and buildings rich with history were all a part of this extended RV vacation in the summer of 1999..
The Summer of 2000 was a wonderful vacation in the wilderness of Yellowstone National Park! We saw bear, bison, moose and other animals and could have spent a couple more weeks there easily!
I think everyone who has done it once will agree that travel by train is a fun way to go. You see the country, have the ability to move about, and don't have to watch the road.
Of course, we like to take pictures, or have pictures taken without any specific reason whatsoever....just to preserve memories of the moment! We all grow and change so much over the months and years that each picture serves as a reminder of that growth!
The drastic change in photo quality seen here is because I have received and learned to use Paint Shop Pro which is a wonderful and very versatile graphics program. I did the color adjustment and the framing of this photo using this program. I considered going back and redoing the photos up until now, but that would require not only renaming each element, but rescanning them all as well.
