A Weekend With Good Friends

We were blessed to have our good friends Don and Kathy Rose with us for all of the Labor Day Weekend. We spent a lot of time talking, eating good food, going to some neat places, and playing lots of Fargle and Hand & Foot. It was essentially a cruise vacation w/o the cruise. Saturday was the last of the triple digit summer heat wave, but we still managed a great trip down to Union Station. Sunday was full of church activities and having a reunion of some of our Panama Canal trip people. Fun evening. Then on Monday, with wonderful cool temperatures and deep blue sky, we took them to Eckerts in Grafton to pick peaches and apples. It was a lot of fun. The above trailer is waiting for us to board to take us to the apple orchard.

This is the peach orchard we walked to first. It was late season and a little hard to find a bunch of nice looking and ripe peaches, but as you can see, we did ok.

This is Kathy, Donna, and me waiting for the aforementioned trailer.

We drafted a nice guy to take our picture after we'd paid for our peaches and apples and taken them back to the car. He was such a nice guy and did a pretty good job - considering the subjects.
From Eckerts, we drove over to Hardin, IL and had a great lunch at Mel's Riverdock restaurant on the IL river. It's where I eat breakfast after a morning hunt. Good stuff! Then we drove down to the Mississippi River and took the Golden Eagle ferry across to St. Charles. It's a really fun trip that we have done with several folks who visited us.

Don & Kathy are dear friends and we truly treasure getting to spend four days together. Can't wait for our winter vacation cruise this February when we get to do even more of everything we did last weekend but in a warm Caribbean location - and on the Grand Princess! Yeah!