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| View of mountains looking toward the North just above Ventura on a cold winter day, January 04, 2011. It's all of 62 degrees today and the sun is shining! You can see the snow on the mountain tops in the background. We live on the foothills that you can see in the foreground of the mountains. What a great place to live! |
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Welcome from Ventura, California, the Gold Coast of California. We are gifted with some of the world's most beautiful views and climate here in this part of the world. We have a mild climate, rarely over 80 degrees and less than 40. We only get about 15 inches of rainfall a year. The sun shines most of the time.
We have mountains and skiing nearby, and the ocean is at our doorstep. So on any given day we could, if we wanted to and I have done this, go SCUBA diving in the morning, be back in Ventura by noon, drive up into the mountains and be in snow by three in the afternoon. We are isolated from Los Angeles, but if we want to go there, we can make it to downtown LA in a little more than an hour. The Rose Parade is so close that as my good wife and grandsons did just this week with the Boy Scout Troop they belong to; they left home at 2 PM, went to Pasadena where the floats were being decorated with flowers for the parade, worked until 11PM gluing flowers onto the floats, and were home by 12:15 and watched the parade on TV at 8 AM.
This area is called the Gold Coast for a good reason. It is a veritable paradise, and we are fortunate to be able to live here. I have been here since 1959, minus a bunch of years while I was off working in other locations, and my mom and step-dad lived here when they retired in Chicago. They are both buried not more than 15 miles from where we live. I moved back here in 1981 and have been here in Ventura ever since. I can't imagine living anywhere else!
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| The view from our foothills of the Santa Monica mountain chain to our south that separates us from Los Angeles. You have to drive up over this range on its far left side, go through Thousand Oaks and Westlake Village to reach the San Fernando Valley and then Los Angeles. It is a good separator for us from the world of chaos in LA. Cheryl just took this photo for me, January 5, 2011. The right end of the mountain range goes down into the Pacific Ocean. If you follow the Pacific Coast Highway, a beautiful scenic route along the water, the road takes you to into Malibu and Santa Monica before getting into LA. |
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The Future of my Web Site
Now as to my Web Site, this used to be a very complete site with all my professional experience detailed in an expanded resume. I am now fully retired, in fact I am just reaching 77 years of age, and such a thing is not necessary any more, so I am in the process of revamping that material into something that just covers lightly where I have been in life. I have included some very brief descriptions of places I worked under the title "Professional Life". Not all of them might be here, and I will include those that are missing at a later date. I hope you enjoy these.
I have also included pages on our almost 8 years years of cruising where I worked as a Guest Lecturer for four different cruise companies. My wife Cheryl and I spent almost 800 days aboard ship over this period. We might still be doing that except for the fact that I got sick and had to quit. Surgery saved my life, and after a two year struggle to regain my strength, we decided that we had enough travel to last us the rest of our lives. Now we just read all about places and problems all over the world.
A page on Idaho is included under "Extracurricular Things" because of the great love I have for that State and the joy of living I encountered during my years of residing in Idaho. I will soon expand pages on Flying, which has been one of my major hobbies over the years, and The Oceans and Me, which covers my love of the water and all the things I have had fun doing over the years.
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| Dick and Cheryl Holt, February 2007 - This photo was taken three months before we took our last cruise on the brand new Holland America Noordam. At the end of that trip I was so sick we went into the emergency room and finally almost a year later found a massive abscess in my abdomen that had been leaking toxins into my body for years without our knowing why I was always so sick. It has taken two years to get back on my feet again, but now as we enter 2011, I am finally doing better and getting stronger every day. |
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