Dan Mcgraw will embark on a Hemet Jeep Club caravan for a Christmas light tour with technology that founders of the 61-year-old organization never could have envisioned.
The avid offroader will use GPS electronics to chart a route to highlights of my annual holiday lights tour through the San Jacinto Valley, a journey he has led for the club for nine years and taken with his family for 15. His love of the lights is evidence that readers from outside the San Jacinto Valley should consider a drive to the Hemet-San Jacinto area to witness the decorations.
Veteran map followers know the entire route is too long to complete in a night. Mcgraw concentrates on the eastern section, where a short tour is marked on the map.
McGraw’s caravan only had about five Jeeps in its first year. Saturday, when the 99-member club begins touring the lights at 6:30 p.m., Mcgraw expects 30 Jeeps will line up. The Jeepers will decorate their vehicles with Christmas lights, making them as much of a spectacle as the decorated homes. Also on Saturday, Diana Tavenner and Debbie Cornett will lead seven decorated antique fire engines on a tour of the route.
Mcgraw has had trouble keeping so many Jeeps in a group, so he started using a GPS system. He drives the route to plot turns where he thinks the Jeeps will be able to stay together.
The Jeeps carry citizen band two-way radios. Drivers chatter about turns as they follow Mcgraw to the lights.
Though they are traveling over pavement (they much prefer dirt), they make the night an outdoor experience by going topless. They take the tops off their Jeeps. “You can’t get the full effect of the Christmas lights unless you take your top off,” he said.
His favorites include the white lights on homes along Tierra Verde Drive. He is impressed with lights in the neighborhood behind the Valle Vista Fire Station at the north end of Fairview Avenue.
He loves the homes off Marshall Avenue, way out east in Valle Vista. In the hillside neighborhood of custom homes, Dennis and Phyllis Patterson added an impressive Santa in a hot-air balloon over his steep yard of spectacular lights and decorations.
On Saturday and Christmas Eve, Santa will visit George and Lori Griley’s Coquina Street home in west Hemet from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Joan and Michael Perrin’s Barnhill Road lights in Valle Vista are remarkable. Nearby on Mayberry Avenue, near Pleasant Street, Martina and Daren Webster show how well a home with a solar-energy system can power lights.
I especially like the collaborative efforts of neighbors. The decorations of Ben and Gail Gray and Pete and Yvonne Duckworth blend together so well that people walk around their Zinnia Street cul-de-sac in west Hemet.
I mapped a neighborly effort on Walden Way, which is off Chelsea Way in Bautista Estates in Valle Vista.
Les Lyon moved to Walden Way in 2003.
“There were only two houses with lights, ours and our next-door neighbor,” he wrote. “As new neighbors moved in, more houses began to show lights, and many of the folks who weren’t decorating are now doing so.
“We have a few folks who are unable to do their own lights due to age or illness, so us younger home owners help out. This is a 55-plus community, so when I say younger, I mean under 80.”
Reach Bob Pratte at 951-763-3452, bpratte@PE.com or 474 W. Esplanade Ave., San Jacinto, CA 92583.
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