Thanksgiving dinner on the river

For my Thanksgiving weekend I decided to go home to California and visit my parents. No one else was going but sometimes it's kind of nice to visit when there's not a dozen or so grandkids running around. I really like hanging out with my nieces and nephews but when they're not there it's so much simpler and you get to do more interesting (read expensive) things. One of the more interesting things we did was eat Thanksgiving dinner on a river boat on the Sacramento river. It was actually really good and the three hour river trip was really pretty. There was still some fall colors along the banks and the sunset was especially nice.

We spent the night there and in the morning we did a little geocaching around Sacramento before leaving. There were flowers blooming in the parks and it was so pleasant. I miss having the camellias blooming in the front yard and tangelos ripening in the backyard in the winter.

These two pictures are places we looked for geocaches but didn't find them. Even if I spent most the time sticking my fingers in creepy cobwebby holes on this rusty bridge and into old rotting tree carcasses, it was still a nice morning to walk along the river. Besides I like taking pictures of wild mushrooms for some reason.

We found a geocache in the pioneer section of the old Sacramento cemetery. I really liked it there and wandered around a lot looking at everything. It was a lot more fun than wandering around old Utah cemeteries. Older, more interesting, and a lot prettier.

This archway was covered in climbing roses. I wish I could see it when it blooms. I thought it was funny how almost all the tombstones said the exact age the person was when they died and where they were native to. Mine would have said 30years, 6 months, 10 days Native of California.

Why doesn't anyone ever name their daughters Ottilia anymore? I wonder if it'll ever come back in fashion?

These two gravestones I found very depressing. This was all they said on them. I can understand the first one, maybe the family was poor or something, but the second one? That's just rude. Neither of them had a full name, date of birth or death. I checked the backs, nothing there either. Who were these people?

Here are a few of the more luxurious gravestones. I always think unvisited graves are depressing. For this reason if I don't have children when I die I think I'd like to be cremated rather than lay in the ground under some standard headstone waiting for no one to visit me...or buried in an unmarked grave on one of those new nature preserve type cemeteries. Actually I don't really care since I'll be dead, I just don't want to be embalmed. Gross.

That was a digression, I was just thinking that if you got buried in a place like this that maybe strangers would visit you just to see your cool headstone, or hide a geocache nearby. So I guess now the choices are cremation, nature preserve, or massive extravagant headstone...

(What a weird way to end a blog entry about Thanksgiving)

This is a much better way to end things...my parents are silly.

Footnote: "cobwebby" was in the spell check but Otillia was not. Poor Otillia.