2008 Spring/Summer Tour - Day 14

We drove from Visalia to L.A., where we met up with Gwendolyn and Brandon from Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang at an ice cream place. To say that our girls were excited would be an understatement... I would say that Gwendolyn and Frances England are equally their favorites in terms of their music, but they've seen Gwendolyn a lot more on videos and on her DVD, so I think they had a much bigger "starstruck" kind of feeling upon seeing and recognizing her. They had the same kind of "I want to tell you everything!" reaction that they had when meeting Frances England, but seemed to have a much harder time articulating that at first, which was cute to watch. I happen to think Gwendolyn's music is incredibly awesome, too, and I was so grateful to meet with her. She is really sweet and I was especially glad that Brandon (Gwendolyn's husband, co-producer and drummer) came along, too, as I had really wanted to meet him as well and ask him some questions in particular about how they work together and about his experiences as part of the group and as a producer. It also helped that he was there to answer some of the questions I had for Gwendolyn while she and Becca had their own conversation going on. I sure wasn't going to interrupt that for the sake of my little interview.

From there we drove to Moreno Valley, where Roseann's sister, LeAnn, lives with her family. The girls played with LeAnn's 4 year-old daughter, Catarina, while I hung out with her husband, Danny. Roseann and LeAnn went to do some shopping and to catch up on things... it's been a few years since they'd seen each other. LeAnn told Roseann that she thought it was cute how excited I got when she told me that we could go to Disneyland on Friday. She has a number of passes and they only live about 45 minutes away. My excitement was really a kind of gratitude for my girls' sake, because taking them somewhere like that would be a real treat for them. It was something we were hoping to do in the next year or two, but with the reports of my friend Phil from his trip there last year about how expensive everything is, I really didn't expect us to be able to afford that now, especially with gas prices making our income from this trip less than it would have been otherwise. We won't be able to go there until about 3 or 4 pm after LeAnn gets out of work, so we'll only have about 5 or 6 hours to spend there, but still, we'll be at Disneyland... How cool is that?! I still remember a family motorhome trip to Disneyworld when I was about 7 or 8 being a real highlight of my childhood, so I'm glad that we can add that to our girls' future memories.

We were able to bring Tiggy in to LeAnn's house, as there are no dogs here or cat allergies to worry about or anything, and he really enjoyed having a nice sized space to roam around in. However, Catarina quickly took a big shine to him and ended up chasing him around, so it became a bit of a cat-and-mouse game, with Catarina as the cat and Tiggy as the mouse! After a while, he was exhausted and I took him back out to the bus.

The girls with Gwendolyn and Brandon...

Becca and Evee playing with Catarina...