We're in Costa Mesa

We got to Grandma Mardell's around 3:30 this afternoon!

She took us out to a great dinner at Souplantation, which is a salad and soup bar. They had the best sourdough bread we've ever tasted. They also had delicious strawberry lemonade and brownies with ice cream and lots of extras on top. Yum! We will be hunting for this restaurant elsewhere. It doesn't exist on the East Coast, so we'll have to get our fill on the way over.

We also showed Mardell all the pictures we've taken so far, plotted out the next few days of our journey, and had a grand tour of all the quilts in the house (which Melissa was very interested in). This is her favorite:

Unfortunately, Alex's aunt Cyn has already claimed it (darn!), so Melissa will have to try making her own. There were many more quilts, but all the pictures wouldn't fit here! Mardell has even more on a CD somewhere that she's looking for right now. Alex has been tinkering with Mardell's computer settings to make the computer a little more streamlined for her.


Tomorrow morning around 4:00 or 5:00 AM we will be having breakfast, at least partially from Mardell's yard. She is very graciously going to be up to help us get out of the house in time to make it all the way to Arizona by tomorrow evening! Melissa's grandmother lives out on a mesa in the beautiful countryside, so we're looking forward to many more pictures of that. Melissa remembers a donkey that used to live down the hill from Grammy Barbara's house, and is wondering whether he's still there. She and it used to "haw" at each other, because the donkey was strangely deficient in "hee"s. :)