Stealth traveling

As our travel plans for the summer changed, we decided to surprise our daughter for her landmark birthday.  We left Pahrump on Saturday and traveled to Mojave.  As we were traveling the highway to Baker, CA we passed relay runners as well as all of their support personnel.  I was able to learn from the internet that Southern CA police departments were hosting a Baker to Las Vegas race (120 miles).  There were 262 teams from across the country and two teams from Europe.  It was 92* a little after 9 a.m.  Bravo to all of those running in the desert heat.

We stopped in Yermo for diesel ($4.43 a gallon - welcome to CA lol) and an early lunch.  Once we got settled in Mojave, we had hoped to see my sister who lived in Lancaster.   When I called her as we were 10 miles from Mojave, she told me that two weeks earlier she had moved to Lawndale (a suburb of LA).  Oh well, best laid plans.

On Sunday, we left Mojave and headed for Los Banos.  We have been very lucky with not having to deal with strong head winds since leaving Tucson.  Kind of unusual heading west across the desert.

Monday found us arriving in Sacramento.  Our original plans were to surprise Melissa at her workplace on her birthday.  When we learned that she was taking the day off to spend a girl day with her best friend, new plans were set in motion.  We conspired with Kelly to surprise Melissa at lunch on Thursday.  Gosh, it was so hard to be in Sacramento and having to cool our heels in seeing our daughter until Thursday.  Luckily, we had a friend drop by and we spent Wednesday evening with John's sister and brother-in-law that all helped to pass the time.

So today was the day that we could finally see our precious daughter.  With Kelly texting us when they would arrive at the restaurant, we get there after they were seated.  We were able to walk up behind Melissa where I slid a birthday card in front of her.  She looks down and I could see that she was perplexed as the card had my writing on it.  She slowly looked over to us where we said Happy Birthday!  Her eyes got large and her jaw dropped.  Success!  Hugs were soon shared.  She asked if we were staying at her aunt and uncles and we said no, we were at Cal Expo.  A big smile crossed her face when we told her we were going to be her for almost a month.  At that point of time, the wait was well worth the reward of seeing her reaction.