Chuck had a fabulous, action-packed 62nd birthday weekend. We drove up to Solvang on Friday and spent Friday night, Saturday, and Saturday night at the Hadsten House (now our favorite place to stay in Solvang) enjoying nice dinners, massages, a lovely yummy chocolate cake, and even some wine tasting with our friend (and fellow birthday celebrator) Valerie. Chuck was our designated driver as wine still tastes like crap to him so Valerie and I got to get loaded do the tasting. And we made Valerie go to Ostrich Land. She was initially reluctant but I feel sure it was one of the highlights of her weekend.
Early Sunday morning we drove from Solvang to Glendale so we could run in the Glendale Downtown Dash, a 5K race, the proceeds for which went to Glendale Adventist Hospital’s Stroke Services Department. We ran the race in honor of our friend Darren, who passed away there recently from a stroke. Chuck finished in a respectable 47 minutes (not bad for an old bald guy in the middle of chemotherapy!). I nearly placed in my age division (according to the folks doing the race results, I placed third but I know I didn’t as I saw my friend Maureen finish ahead of me – they just screwed up – so congrats Maureen!!) so I had a good race, too. A bunch of our running friends were having brunch at a restaurant in Glendale, so we stopped by to say hi and found out that our friend Perri had baked a cake for Chuck! Yum! First cake of the day! We couldn’t stay too long because we had to quickly head off to our next venue (after first stopping at the Rose Bowl Aquatic Center to take showers so we wouldn’t stink up the car and every place we went for the rest of the day with our smelly clothes and b.o. – but uh-oh! we forgot towels so had to dry off with aforementioned skanky clothes).
After the showers, we had brunch with our friends Kyra and Tim – and after brunch Chuck got another dessert! Then we hopped in the car and drove and drove and drove to Joshua Tree National Park where Chuck got his long awaited America the Beautiful senior pass (it includes parking!! and national forests!! and it’s good for a lifetime!!).
We drove about 10 miles into Joshua Tree before realizing that a) it’s a really big place and b) we were never going to see all of it in one afternoon. So we turned around and drove and drove all the way back home to find that our friend Camille had baked an all-lemon cake for him.
Phew! It was quite a day! With a lot of desserts. Mmmmm. Photos here.