Our Old Hometown of Turlock

We left San Juan Bautista at the early (for us) hour of 9:00am. It's a fairly easy drive through Hollister, over Pacheco Pass, through Los Banos, and on to Turlock. We made our way to our good friends Kathy & Bob Whiteheads ranch, and parked next to Bob's Famous Red Barn.

The reason Bob's barn is so famous is because he has a geocache on his ranch, and on geocaching.com it's known as Red Barn Bob. Many people have found it, some with Bob's assistance.

While we're here we're going to add our first travel bug to the cache, one honoring Best Friends Animal Society. The metal tag has a tracking number that unique to this bug. We hope it gets moving to other caches soon.

Our reason for coming to Turlock at this time is to visit Doctors. Our joy in coming back to Turlock is to visit all of our friends who we miss dearly.

Thursday, April 24, was our first busy day at the Doctors. Linda & John both had appointments for their annual physicals, John had an appointment with a dermatologists, and Linda had a follow up appointment with her hand Doctor. All of the appointments went well, except the the dermatologist wants to remove a cyst off of John's shoulder. John knew he couldn't get through the week without something. On the following Tuesday, John went under the knife, and 4 stitches later he was fine. He didn't even faint or scream! The biopsy came back fine so there's no problem.

On the following Tuesday, before the surgery, John met with his cancer doctor and everything was back to normal. The doctor was very pleased, but not as pleased as Linda & John. The blood counts were great, and there's no sign of any bleeding in John's stomach. We don't have to go back for another 6 months.

Most of the time we spent in Turlock was with our friends. Kathy is a terrific cook and we were lucky to eat dinner with them 4 times. We also went out to dinner a number times with different friends, visiting others at their houses, and playing Mexican Train a couple of times which Bob won(I think he cheats, but I can't figure out how).

One of the highlights of the week was a 60th birthday bash for our good friend and car nut, Gary Sanders. Rosemarie put on a great party, first for his family, then for all of his friends. We were honored to be invited and meet some of Gary's childhood friends. It was a great night that went into the next day. Congratulations to Gary on reaching this milestone. His family bought him a hydraulic car lift, so we know where Gary is going to be spending the summer, under one of his cars.

John got to visit with his old friends from work. When we first arrived in town, John had lunch with George & Kristine, plus all of the old field personnel who were in town for a training. John had a great time catching up with the field, and throwing barbs back & forth. The following week John had lunch with just Kris & George, which allowed him to get updates on their families and friends.

All to soon our appointments were completed, and we needed to travel down to SoCal for other appointments. We'll miss our friends, but we won't miss the Doctors(especially John). Hopefully we can meet up somewhere outside of Turlock with some of our friends on a special trip.

Best Friends-A Revisit

We had a special treat when Jeni decided to spend her spring break with us in AZ. Of course the real reason for her trip was to visit the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, UT, with her Mom. This was Linda's second visit. The details can be found here: http://jchuber.blogspot.com/2007/09/best-friends-animal-sanctuary.html
I decided to stay back at the motorhome with Pearl.

When they got to the sanctuary they took the tour of the entire facilities. During the tour, Jeni got to meet something in addition to the regular animals.

Linda & Jeni dug right in with the volunteer work, starting with the dogs. In fact Linda enjoyed working with the dogs so much, the only other area she worked in was the bird area. I'm sure that surprises everyone! Jeni divided her other time with the cats (another surprise), bunnies, horses, and birds. It was like an animal smorgasbord.

Here's one of the friends Jeni made besides all of the dogs and cats.

One of the unique experiences Best Friends allows is the chance to take an animal back to your room at night. Of course Linda & Jeni took advantage of this option. Here's one of the dogs that they helped socialize during their visit.

And you wonder why I stayed back at the motorhome! I didn't think there would be space left for me to sleep.

Both of my girls had a great experience in their volunteer work. They're looking forward to doing it again soon. If you want to learn more about Best Friends and the work they do worldwide, here's the link:

http://www.bestfriends.org/

It's a great organization. In fact they now have a TV show called Dogtown on National Geographic Channel. Watch it and you can learn a lot more about it.

Best Friends Animal Sanctuary

One of our goals during our adventure was to visit Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, UT. We've been members for a few years and really admire this organization. The Sanctuary is about 3800 acres adjacent to another 30,000 leased acres of BLM land. At any given time the sanctuary has 1500 dogs, cats, & other animals. Once they're at the sanctuary, nothing bad will happen to them. Hopefully they'll be adopted by a family, but if not they have a home for a lifetime. This is the welcome center. Each year about 20,000 people visit the sanctuary and take a tour.

During the tour, we visited the many different areas devoted to the different animals that are currently at the facility. That includes Dogtown, and the new dog area, Dogtown Heights.

The buildings are designed specifically for the dogs and include exercise areas, and agility areas for training dogs for stairs, cars and other everyday obstacles. The areas that contain the dogs include an inside area with a bed and warm floors. There also an outside area that the dogs can access at any time through a doggy door. Each dog is evaluated and given a collar that defines their sociability. Green collars for very social dogs, purple collars for dogs that are sociable with adults, with other dogs at different levels.

There are other similar facilities for cats, birds, bunnies, horses, and wild animals that are being rehabilitated for release to the wild. They also have rescue operations during emergencies such as Katrina. Every weekend they have adoption events in nearby areas like Las Vegas & Phoenix. This is a large non profit organization with over 400 employees and many volunteers, which this week includes Linda! She plans to work for the week we're here to learn more about the Best Friends, and their mission.

If you would like to see all of the photos of Best Friends, please click on the following link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/jchuber1/BestFriendsAnimalSanctuary

Thanks for reading our adventures!