Ellen In Amerika!"MY EMIGRATION TO AMERICA AND MY ADJUSTMENT TO LIFE IN CALIFORNIA SINCE SEPTEMBER 2008"

Again it has been a very long time since I wrote here. I do not know why, but I am not so inspired lately. When I started to blog, I did it to share my life here with my family in the Netherlands and keep them updated with my new life here in the States. After about a year, I decided to write in English, mainly because some of my American family in law were reading this post and surprisingly, also people from around the world who did the effort to read my posts through Google translate. It has been a joy to discover that I had readers with whom I am staying in contact and who became my blog buddies.

Most of my family and friends back in Holland are now so adjusted to the idea I live on the other side of the world, it is not that exciting anymore to read about my daily life, and with most of them I am in close contact (email, phone) anyway.  I have to admit, I like to write. I always had that. At school I had great grades for essays. (My mom said I had lots of imagination.) I am not saying that I will stop writing this blog, but I have the feeling it becomes less interesting to write about my daily life for the outside world. I am still very, very excited that I live in this great country with the best husband ever. I feel a part of this country. When we were celebrating the 4th of July at the College campus with thousands of Americans, I felt secretly I was one of them. I sang the National Anthem loud and did the Pledge of Allegiance as well. So what is going on now, makes me immensely sad; that the two political parties here can make such a mess and refuse to do their job! Disgusting!! Sorry…… I had to say that…..

Anyway, things are going very well here. Last weekend we had 5 members of my family in law visiting here, and it was a blast. I got to know them a bit during our family reunion, and now we were able to intensify our new family bond. We went to Santa Barbara and visited the mission, the pier and we went shopping. Three Teenage girls and two moms shopping…poor dads  :-)

So for now I say goodbye!

We are back from a great vacation in the Smokey Mountains with Dan’s family, now also my family  It has been a wonderful time.  We had so much fun and nice talks. We did adventurous activities and we relaxed a lot.   One of the activities was Zip lining. This was by far the most adventurous activity I have done in at least 25 years. In the early morning we drove up to the Zip line facility. There they put you in harnesses and helmets. They explained the rules and then they drove us in open army trucks up the mountain to the first platform. I was pretty scared by the heights of the platform and the length of the cable you had to go down to the next platform. But it was great! It was so thrilling to zip down the cable through the mountains and seeing all the trees underneath you.  Here  is one of the pictures in their brochure, it was really like the picture.

Below an impression of our vacation.  The zip line pictures will come later. If the slide show goes too fast, you can click on middle pause button, then you can control the slideshow by clicking on the right forward arrow.

What a nice weekend we had. Saturday morning we went to the gym, and we had a great workout.  After coming home, I took a shower and  made a quick lunch. At 2.30 PM Dan took me to work. My shift went fine. Not overly busy, but still enough to do to not become bored. Dan picked me up at 11.30 PM, and we watched a recorded movie, Taken with Liam Neeson and Famke Janssen (a Dutch actress!). We already had seen this one years ago, but it was still good to see it again.  Unfortunately I fell asleep after 20 minutes of watching, so we went to bed.

Sunday morning, Ryan and I gave Dan his Father’s Day presents and cards, and I made his favorite breakfast: Pancakes! After talking with one of my sisters on the phone and Dan working for Ruysdeal Design, we went to Wildwood Park in Thousand Oaks. This park has several trails and we decided to do the Paradise Waterfall trail. We have done this trail several times, but every time it is so beautiful. We had not been hiking for some time, but we were up and walking as if it was yesterday!  Here is a slide show with some of the pictures we took. The last one shows a picture of a rattlesnake, a huge one. It was pretty scary at one point because the snake locked eyes with Dan and he was recoiling. Then we thought it would be wise to move on When you click the forward button under the slideshow, you can pace the slideshow manually.

Around 4.30  PM we were home again, and Dan started the barbecue. I cleaned the corn on the cobs and made baked potatoes. We had again a great dinner with all kinds of little side dishes.

In the evening we watched the rest of the movie Taken, and now I managed to stay awake till the end. I really can recommend this movie.