San Diego, Hollywood, Beach Camping...

May 2, 2019

Yesterday we spent the day in San Diego, first at Balboa Park and then at Ocean Beach. At Balboa we visited the Zoo and 2 art museums. The zoo is awesome. Some highlights:

Two types of tapirs. One type (Baird’s tapir) includes a young fellow and these tapirs live together with capibaras!
Watching the orangutans play was awesome. A dad was playing with his 2-year old. Normally these animals are solitary in nature but not so here. The dad’s hair was long and majestic dreadlocks.
Elephants, flamingos, giraffes, crocodiles, penguins, hippo, polar bears, monkeys — all superb.

The museums were:

Timken Museum of Art
Museum of Photographic Arts

The Timken was OK but the Photographic Arts one was amazing. It had bugs photographed under a microscope (this was a meticulous process that took weeks for every photo). However, my overall favourite was from an Australian artist’s series of photos. It was called Beach Grubs and portrayed a chaotic beach scene with alien grubs attacking.

Today we went to the USS Midway Museum. The Midway is a decommissioned aircraft carrier which operated 1945-1991. It was named after a WWII battle at Midway Island that turned the war against Japan to the United States’ favour.

I loved the place. There was a great tour of the navigation/steering areas. My favourite was 2 separate presentations on 1. The CAT (catapult) used to launch planes off the carrier and 2. The arresting cables used to land planes. All the presentations were by employees or volunteers that had served but were not retired. Thus, they were all highly knowledgeable. A walk through the ship allowed us to see kitchens, berths, laundry, strategic decision making room. This room had the radars playing back a specific day from the first Gulf War, indicating actual positions of all vessels (friendly, enemy, unknown) on that day.

We then drove to Dana Point to the Doheny State Beach campground. Our campsite backs onto ocean beach. It is gorgeous. I’m doing laundry nearby.

May 4, 2019

Our evening at Doheny campground was lovely. We feasted on fettuccini Alfredo with chicken and broccoli and had a beach campfire. The girls went swimming — or, more accurately, were whipped around by the waves. Amy took some video showing their joy. They then learned the sorrow of getting sand under the bathing suit in every which place. They went on a mission to have showers, which they discovered required tokens and so it took a while to complete the mission.

Excellent side note: our neighbours were a very nice young man and woman camping in the handicapped spot. Their old (15 years) beautiful dog (Freddie) kept wandering over to our campsite. The man would come over and apologetically retrieve him. He explained that the dog was fully deaf, nearly blind and hadn’t listened to commands even when he was younger. In the evening Freddie wandered around on the beach (where dogs weren’t allowed) sporting his vest marked SERVICE DOG. If you ever read the novel RAZOR GIRL this will remind you of John and John the second.

The next day we had a lazy morning and then quickly visited the visitor Center with its small aquarium (little sharks, rays, eels, very cool) before heading to Los Angeles. In L.A. we went to visit the Grifith Observatory that is in the movie Lala Land. The road to the observatory was closed due to construction so we walked the last mile. The observatory was also under construction and closed. We did snap some pics with the HOLLYWOOD letters behind. Then the girls realized that Miriam’s beloved stuffy Lala (“doll” in Polish) belongs in Lala Land! They started to imagine how Lala would move to Lala Land, clean up the smog, become mayor and paint the HOLLYWOOD letters pink (her favourite colour). These musings lasted for hours.

Then followed a very long and trafficky drive (4+ hours) to Montana do Oro State Park Islay Creek Campground. Cheryl and John, a kind Californian couple in their 60s invited us to their campfire where the kids roasted marshmallows and we chatted for hours. Dinner had been Greek packets again (chicken, potatoes, red onion, feta, olives roasted in aluminum foil packets for 45 min.) — delicious!

It’s 10am the next morning and we’re at the beach (5 min. walk from campsite — we could hear the waves crashing all night long last night). The beach features a splendid variety of rocks and shells that Amy, Lucy and Miriam hunt for vigorously as I write.

Ocean Beach