The Catalina Crew

As some of you may already know, Jacob is a Miniature-Golf fanatic! On any given day, if you were to ask him what he wanted to do, the odds are high that he would reply: “Lets go play mini golf!”

Another Hole-In-One

Back in Salt Lake, his favorite place to play was Dottie’s on 33rd south. Many people will remember this as the old Arnold Palmer Mini Golf Course. Every week or two, we would make the short journey down the hill for a nice $6 round of golf. (That was $6 for all three of us!) After we moved here it didn’t take long before Jacob discovered the Golf Gardens, Avalon’s incredible mini-golf course. Within a few days Jacob became a regular at the course and mastered several of the holes. He knows exactly which tunnel holes to hit for the best result, but still insists on getting his ball into each and every tunnel on the multi-level holes. Jacob is very serious about his game but doesn’t mind sharing the green with other kids on the course on occasion. Unfortunately, however, he takes particular pleasure in blocking Dad’s attempts to score by standing on top of the cup.

HEY!!! So now you can be automatically notified when we have a new post on the blog!!!

Spiffy, Eh?

All you have to do is register (Click the little link on the right that says “Register”) and no matter where in the world you may be, you can immediately know that we have updated our blog.

Woohoo!

Sue and Jacob have gone “overtown” for a few days to visit with the Neff’s and G & G Holt, leaving me all alone for the week. So sad. I tried to keep my mind off the fact that they weren’t here by spending my half-day off snorkeling and playing guitar.

Ah, but there is so much for me to do here. It is currently 11:30 PM and I am at the store trying to track down some problems in our inventory system. For some reason the corporate database thinks we have different amounts of product than the store database does. This makes it difficult to use the ordering system and orders take much longer to place than they should. So, while I wait for the online pages to re-load I am writing a few words at a time here for you.

We finally got some of the pictures from Sue’s cell phone camera downloaded onto the computer so you can see some more recent pics. The aren’t quite as good as a real camera, but they are a lot better than my phone’s camera. Until we get a new digital camera, you will have to be happy with this.

For your first treat, here are a couple of photos from a recent lunch on the harbor beach in front of my store.

In case you were wondering, here is my store. Not the best picture ever, but at least it gives you an idea:

And here is my wonderful team:

Danielle, Lacy, Jared, Leeann, Jenny

Another shot of the inside with a few customers:

Now you know~!

One of the fun things about Sue working at the Catalina Island Museum is all the neat tidbits that she learns about the island and Avalon’s history. Anyone who has been to Catalina will recall hearing the beautiful ringing of the bells coming from the tower on the hill north of town. Few people realize how and why the bell tower (or more properly, the chime tower) came to be.

Not far from where this tower stands, sits the house of the great novelist Zane Grey. Zane moved to Catalina in the 1920’s and it was from his home here that he penned many of his novels and brought the “western” genre into popularity in the U.S. and worldwide. It was not long however before he crossed words with Ada Wrigley, the wife of chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, Jr. who owned about 90% of the island. Ada Wrigley could not stand Zane Grey and despised him such that she had her husband construct this bell tower only a few hundred yards from the Zane Grey Pueblo. Ada instructed that the chimes should be set to ring every 15 minutes throughout the day so as to annoy Zane and continually interrupt his writing.

The Zane Grey Pueblo still stands on the hillside near the bell tower and is now a 16 room bed and breakfast. However, it is in danger of being demolished for construction of new condos or other development. The Zane Grey West Society is working to preserve it, but is unable to afford the $17 million price tag. The chimes however, still ring every 15 minutes.