California 5/1/08

We headed towards the Nixon Presidential Library and Birthplace early this morning and got there as they opened at 10am. It was a beautiful and interesting place. I found it interesting to learn more about him because what I remember most were his presidential years and nothing before then. I was surprised to see that the place is actually bigger than it looks and it took about 3 hours for us to go through it all. The house where he was born was the actual place and not something that had been moved there. We also saw where he and his wife were buried. The only thing that disappointed me was that the Watergate exhibit was closed and they were redoing it. We found out there were 2 Nixon Libraries: one by the Archives and one by the Foundation. Now the one by the Foundation is a federal library and will be combined with the Archives so that everything will be in one place at Yorba Linda. Of course my “conspiracy theory” husband thinks that little by little history is being changed as we know it and this is how they are doing it. Somehow little “items” will be “lost” and incidents won’t be remembered exactly the way it happened. I don’t know if he is right or not but it is one way of looking at it because I do know the Civil War is taught differently in the North (where I grew up and learned about it) and the South (where I taught about it).

After the Library, we headed towards Edwards Air Force Base so we could find the meeting place and get a hotel before Friday morning. The scariest thing happened to us and we narrowly escaped being killed by 2 enormous tractor trailers. We were on Hwy 58 and approached a traffic light as it turned yellow. My husband started to brake and stop when he looked in his rear view mirror to see the truck barreling down on us, never slowing down. Don immediately hit the gas and swerved into the middle of the intersection, facing the oncoming left turn lane. Just as he got there, the truck whizzed right by me on the right, going through the red light. As soon as it passed, Don swerved back to the right to get out of the way of the turning lane when he noticed the second truck coming through the red light behind him and all he could do was hit the gas to outrun the truck. Now we know the first truck ran the red light so the second one had to definitely go through it too. We were lucky that the trucks didn’t run over us in our little Prius, that the oncoming cars didn’t hit us or that the cross traffic didn’t start to move while we were in the middle of the intersection. It is so comforting to know that God is taking care of us because there is no way we would have survived that kind of impact.

We finally found the meeting place and hunted for a hotel. We finally found one in Lancaster, CA. I can’t wait for the tour of Edwards Air Force Base on Friday.