Seeing America: San Dimas, CA 3/17 - 3/19 and Greenfield CA 3/20-3/21

We have started an effort to see all of the Presidential Libraries. We have already visited the Reagan Library in California so we took the opportunity to see the only other Presidential Library in California: The Richard Nixon Library. It is located on what was once the location of the Nixon family's small citrus farm.

After a very well done video we toured the exhibits. Every presidential library has a mock up of the Oval Office as decorated by that President. Each President designs their rug and selects the furnishings. We also saw a mock up of the East Room.

We were surprised by the extent of the items on the list of his domestic legacy.

Most surprising to us was the large percentage of the exhibits focused on Watergate. You definitely felt like there was a real push for total transparency. But there were also a lot of other interesting exhibits.

On display was an actual Marine One Helicopter used by Nixon and several other Presidents. They send out three helicopters every time a President takes off!!

As the library is located on land owned by the Nixon family, his boyhood home is on the property. You can tour it and there is a great model of the home on display inside the library.

Also outside the library you can see: 1) The Pat Nixon Amphitheatre donated by Dolores and Bob Hope, 2) Mark trying out a coffee from a carafe with a presidential seal, and 3) the back of the library set up for a wedding. It is a beautiful facility!

To end our tour we paid our respects at the burial site of Richard and Pat Nixon.

Also in this area is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). They do very few tours and tickets are not easy to get. But we managed to get tickets! JPL is a joint effort of NASA and Caltech.

The tour starts with a great video highlighting all of the work done at JPL. We saw mock ups of some of the more recent space telescopes. Juno, in the top left, after a 5 year cruise, reached Jupiter and went into orbit for a 20 month mission. It was the first solar powered mission to Jupiter. Cassini, in the top right, began its mission on Oct 15, 1997 for a 6 1/2 year travel to Saturn. After over 20 years in space, it recently descended to the surface of Titan to end it mission.

We had the amazing opportunity to view the clean room where they are building the next rover to go to Mars. Top photo is the actual rover!!

We saw a model of Curiosity, Mars Science Laboratory Rover, which made a dramatic landing on Mars on 8/5/2012. A young girl won the K-6th grade contest to name this rover. She got to inscribe her name on the bottom of the rover, and was present at the launch. Amazingly, she is now an employee at JPL!! They are having a similar contest for the current rover. Neat story - the JPL techs wanted to put a JPL logo in the Curiosity rover. NASA said no, so they spelled out JPL in Morse code on the tires!!

Next part of the tour was a visit to Space Flight Operations! Here they monitor communications with the space telescopes.

This was an interesting visual where the lights ascend when JPL is sending info out and descend when info is coming back.

There is a quirky tradition at Space flight Ops - peanuts! They snacked on peanuts during a successful operation so now they always have peanuts on hand!

Its time to leave San Dimas but we want to share our beautiful site at East Shores RV Park!

The next stop is Greenfield, CA to visit our 35th National Park: Pinnacles.

This is a popular area for birders as there are many birds in the area including the famous California Condor

Not much of a visitors center - no video and not much on exhibit. So we quickly headed outside and took a short hike that led to the back of the pinnacles mountain.