Our New Life Together….

Wally and I spent our wedding night at the Hilton Hotel on I-25 and Orchard Road.  Don’t start blushing, I’m not sharing anything here about that.  But this is kind of funny.  It was a brand new hotel and if you live in the metro area you know that is a pretty busy little part of town.  29 years ago we wanted to order pizza and can you believe it?  No one delivered out that far!   Oh well, we didn’t really need the pizza, wink, wink!

We had a short honeymoon in Buena Vista.  We stayed at a cabin…and can you believe the name of the place was the Love Ranch! 

Well we loaded up all my worldly belongings and our wedding gifts and set out for California!  My little pinto pulling that trailer, we barely made it out of the state. Approaching  Eisenhower Tunnel we had to drive on the side of the highway because we were only doing five mph!

Wally had rented us an apartment in Fairfield, CA.  His good friend Mike Rea rented the apartment right across from us.  Mike married Beth earlier in the summer and actually spent a night with my family on their way back to Cali.  Beth was so touched by my Dad’s prayer for them at breakfast and again before they left that it planted a seed in her thinking. When I arrived we became pretty good friends.  After all our husbands worked weird shifts together and we had a lot of time on our hands.  She began asking me questions about the Lord.  And one day I had the privilege of leading her to trust Jesus as her personal Savior.  A nice beginning! 

Here we are outside our apartment building.

Here’s Wally in our dining room.  No, we did not have a table.  But we did have a pop can collection!  Wally had collected over 700 cans.  Neither one of us knows what happened to those cans!  And we did get a table.  We used our wedding money to buy one.  Probably that was not a good decision as we had to sell it to go overseas.  Oh, did I mention that two weeks before we got married, Wally received orders for a new assignment…England!  And as an Airman First Class, we weren’t allowed to take ship much in weight.

Wally’s folks gave us their tandem bicycle.  We did take that to England!

We were only 60 miles from San Francisco.  We could enjoy a day there with only ten bucks in our pocket. Enough to get a sub sandwich at the Viking sub shop on Van Nuys Avenue.  We would always park on Van Nuys Avenue because the expensive car dealers were there also.  After drooling in the windows we would catch the street car down to Fisherman’s Wharf.  There was lots to be entertained with on fisherman’s Wharf without spending money…the mimes, the panhandlers, the shops, the water, great clam chowder and elephant’s ears!  Those were good times!!

The story continues…