Hanging out with the young and old - welcome to our 40th class reunion!

After the girl and guy trips, we spent a few more days near Kansas City with our son and his family (That is a cue to post a couple more pictures we took of our granddaughter, Carter.)

We're teaching her things like clapping to the song, "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands."

And she's refreshing our crawling skills while we're trying to keep up with her.

She has a house-full of toys that play music and blink lights, but we are amazed that she still enjoys the simple things. She found this fascinating toy that kept her attention for a whole hour!

No flashing lights here--that's a double pack of dental floss that was so interesting!

We also went on a safari while we were visiting. That yellow piece of wood is actually a lion puzzle piece. So it looks like Carter is on safari--shooting a lion in the picture below.

After another dose of Carter-time, we continued our car road trip as we made the six-hour trip back to Beaver, Oklahoma. Now we have changed from hanging out with the very youngest to be reuniting with some old folks. Welcome to our 40th class reunion!

It's hard to believe that we were all in high school forty years ago! Mark and Denisa graduated the same year from the same high school, so we both enjoy going to the same class reunion. Now we are immortalized on the hallowed walls of good old Beaver High School. Our pictures are close together on the left hand side because we were both class officers. What we didn't understand forty years ago, is that for some reason senior class officers are forever responsible for class reunions. That gets complicated when you travel full-time, so we were glad that other classmates stepped up to plan everything this time.

We had a total of 14 show up for the various events of the weekend. That's way down from reunions of the past. But that's because some people are waiting for a promised class reunion in the Oklahoma City area later this year. It will be easier for people to fly in and there are far more options for hotels in the metro area. So hopefully we'll be seeing more classmates if that reunion will coincide with our travel plans.

One of those local planners did a great job of decorating our table for the high school banquet. She used one of the band uniforms she bought at a recent school auction. That uniform was brand new 40 years ago, and we were pretty stylish with those tall shaker hats.

We are proud to say that we were a sweepstakes band two of our high school years. That means we made a top rating in marching, sight reading, and concert band at state. Band was a big thing at our little high school. One year we marched 100 students, so almost everyone was in band. A highlight of the class reunion was watching some marching videos. We were pretty sure that we were awesome, but seeing that old film was proof!

Besides the band memories, Mark's highlight was getting to visit with some of the people that he went to school with for all twelve years. The memories and stories were getting pretty deep by the end of the weekend.

Since we started with the very young, it seems fitting to end this blog with the very old.  Denisa went to grade school at a little country school where both her parents were teachers. So her 89-year-old Mother came to see some of the students she taught 45 years ago.


Our time in Beaver wasn't without some bad weather that we have come to expect this year. We spent some time in the cellar one afternoon when tornadoes were sighted in the panhandle. When those giant wall clouds start rotating into funnels that start lowering to the ground, it's time to get underground.

Hail covered the ground when we came out of the cellar. We are glad that our motor home is sitting in Oklahoma City instead of here in the panhandle right now.

This was Memorial Day weekend, so we spent some time taking our Mothers to four different cemeteries to decorate graves.

Then we spent several more days with both of our Mothers, as this will be the last time we're in this part of the country for a while. Denisa has to include a few more turkey pictures. These are fun creatures to watch in this rural setting.

These toms were all puffed up, trying to impress the hens that seemed to be totally ignoring them.

This unsuccessful courting process made for some great pictures sitting on the front porch of Mark's Mother's house.

So we finished our road trip at our Mothers' houses. We enjoyed being able to hang out with both the young (our granddaughter) and the old (our Mothers) and all those old youngsters we call "classmates" from 40 years ago. Our old stomping grounds in the panhandle of Oklahoma has some of the prettiest sunsets we see anywhere, so it seems fitting to end this road trip with a picture of the skies over the pastures there.