Road Trips with Ruby

  AMSTERDAM BEFORE THE CRUISE We stayed at the Leonardo Museum hotel, across a side street from Rijks Museum. According to our travel agent, Cookie, we had a “Cozy Room”. We laughed and said we wouldn't worry about falling because there was nowhere to fall! We got in, tired and hungry. The hotel had a restaurant, but they were on break, so we ended up at an Irish pub (in the Netherlands!).  It had a stained glass window of St. Prosper and I texted my Catholic friend to see if there really was a Saint Prosper (there is!) After a good night's rest, we spent most of the day on a hop-on-hop-off-bus/boat. We quickly figured out the boat was the best, as it was basically a canal cruise with stops. The city is beautiful and they have killer bikes that own the red sidewalks. My job became keeping Dave "out of the red"!! We had thought about renting bikes or using the ones on the boat but figured out quickly we would not keep up and would be an accident waiting to happen. Th...

  May I give you a rose? THE ROSE PARADE WITH ROAD SCHOLARS We've always wanted to see The Rose Parade and when the trip appeared in a Road Scholars email, it seemed like the perfect opportunity.  The program included working on floats, "band fest", a grandstand seat at the parade, and an up-close view of the floats at "float fest". On Friday we volunteered to help decorate floats.  Our "float barn" (a big warehouse) had 6 floats in various stages of completion.  We cut and prepared flowers for three of them.  The roses and Dutch Irises came to us in 5-gallon buckets (75 rose stems).  Our job was to cut them to about 3-4 inches, strip the leaves and put them in vials with water and preservative. Luckily, they had already been "de-thorned". These would then be transferred to the floats.  David worked the guillotine cutter, I would strip the leaves, and we both helped put them in vials. Our group processed at least 50 buckets of roses = 3750 ro...