08/02/24 Amsterdam Canal Cruise

We took a scenic canal cruise through Amsterdam - they call it the Venice of the North. Amsterdam has a unique canal system that offers the best vantage point to view the city and it's famous sights. Amsterdam has 1500 bridges and 165 canals. After a run 1 hour cruise through the canals our boat departed out of Amsterdam.

We were really enjoying getting to know some of our friends from the cruise. Carmen and Ralph Lee were fun to talk to. Carmen is from Chile and has a thick accent and is very loud and bubbly and funny.

Ralph was fun as well although a little less wild than his wife! haha.

He had a scary story to tell about how he was attacked in 2018 in his dry cleaning shop. He was pummeled with a baseball bat and beaten until he was practically dead (he did flat line for a little while). They were able to revive him and after months/years of work he still suffers hearing loss and other side effects but he is functioning and still working at his cleaner shop in St George.

Delicious breakfast buffet

The pool was on the roof of the boat

So many bikes everywhere

Going through a channel.

You could literally reach out and touch the walls.
We went through 10 channels during
the course of our trip.

One of the many forms of
entertainment of a local

Our guide

Ralph and Carmen Lee

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01/12/26 Just a couple of things going on

Every Monday night we do family night pizza. This has included Eldon and Diane for quite awhile now. They left on a round the world cruise and will be gone from January - May. So we sent them a pic of these two cuties and told them we missed them. Found this fun scratch off -- you can mark everywhere you've been. We want to travel in our retirement and thought this would be a fun way to keep track of it. (We also have a world map but I think 1 on the wall is enough). SO this is our little inspiration wall to remind us to get out and see the world! Holly painted this picture on her wall a couple of years ago. I added some words and music notes in vinyl to it. I'm working on turning her bedroom into my music sanctuary. The WELCOME pineapple sign was starting to peel off. I took off all the vinyl and painted the words instead. Gave it a nice refresh! We signed up for classes at the college too -- currently we are taking World travel, AI (artificial intelligence), Aging an...

01/13/26 How Many Cookies?!?!?

I planned to visit Washington City and go to the ladies luncheon (they do it monthly on shut off day). I found a new recipe that included putting smashed pretzels in the mix. (I had smashed pretzel, cereal mixture leftover from Christmas). The recipe said it would make 22 cookies. I figured I would triple it and have 66. Welp...they must have been some BIG cookies they were making...cause I got 126 cookies!!!! What the heck?! I backed 24 of them and put the rest in the freezer. Someone will have a nice treat another day!

05/21/26 Rod Griffin History

I am Rod Griffin. I was born in Salt Lake City, actually. In a house on 700 East between 400 and 500 South. That’s what my parents told me, anyway. Born in the back of a house in 1935. When I was a year old my dad opened up a bakery in America Fork, Utah. He operated that bakery for essentially the rest of his career until he retired. So I kinda grew up in a bakery. American Fork was, at that time, a small town — 3,000 people or so. It was good to grow up in a small town. Everybody knew everybody else almost, and everybody knew everybody’s business, too. But that’s the way it is in a small town — but it was good. Me and my friends would go all around town on our bicycles and we would sometimes take our bicycles down to Utah Lake and go swimming in the lake, not realizing how polluted it was at the time. And you know, when you’re young, nothing affects you anyway. So we’d go down and throw that black muck at each other, and so on. Anyway, I went to — t...

Griffin Family

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