Since we’re having a classic rainy weekend here in Southern California, we won’t be getting out to see any sights (other than those on the way to Home Depot and maybe Joann Fabrics!). But I thought you might like to see a little bit of our project this month – both what this camp is like, and also just what we’ve been busy doing.
Indian Hills has quite a facility here. Their target age group is 8 – 14, and the camp does a great job of appealing to those kids! There are lots of fun options for sleeping -
Cabins
-
Tents

Tipis

and Covered Wagons.

For activities they start with a couple of pools

(This one is closed for the season – but I think you can get the drift!)
and great playground.

Plus they have archery, dirt bikes courses, and rock climbing, along with hiking trails and all your standard ball fields. Oh, and they also have one of those Human Foosball Courts!
While they have groups in over the weekends during these winter months, this is definitely their time to catch-up on lots of maintenance and upgrades. The guys have had quite a variety of ‘chores’ – from building bunk beds in the tipis

to rebuilding the steps to the office,

to patching cracks in all of the cabins and bathrooms.

Right now they are almost all working in a kitchen remodel.

As you can see, they have all been kept plenty busy!
We ladies, likewise, have not been wondering what to do. Pretty much we’ve been spending our time painting bathrooms. They have three bath houses -you know, four sinks, three toilets, three showers or some variation thereof. Here’s one side of one -

And then there is one building with 6 individual wash rooms and 6 individual showers. So far we’ve painted everything but one side of one of the bath houses.
Oh, and when we would run out of paint – there was always bathroom CLEANING that we could do. Now I don’t want you to think that all of the showers looked like this because they didn’t. But sometimes by the end of the summer, the soap scum just wins. This one was especially bad.

Much to the amazement of the janitor (a very sweet 22 year old guy – really, what could he possibly know about soap scum?), we managed to get this one looking like new!

Nuttin’ like a little Sower Lady Elbow Grease!

We celebrated the end of our second week (actually I think we were actually celebrating the start of our long weekend!) with a trip to Dairy Queen.

Now that’s a group of hard workin’ Sowers if I’ve ever seen one!

Since we didn’t have a real plan (or a huge budget) for seeing the sights of San Diego, we decided to start with the “59 Mile Scenic Drive.” The drive seemed to hit all of the high points of the city and surrounding area and we figured it would give us feel for what we might want to spend our tourist dollars on in the weekends to come. Plus, the price was right. The visitor center charged $.50 – and we could have downloaded it for free if we had done enough research!
So, pretend you’re in a sleek convertible ’cause here we go!

Downtown. It was lovely, even though we did have a rough time finding the visitor center. And then it turned out we found the WRONG visitor center. (You’d think they would have had largely the same “stuff”, but the downtown VC is really just about, well, downtown. Go figure.)

After we found the RIGHT Visitor Center we began the Scenic Drive by checking out the two man-made islands in the harbor – Harbor Island and Shelter Island.

Next on the route was Point Loma and the Cabrillo National Monument. There were some pretty interesting sights along the road down to the Cabrillo National Monument (which celebrates the Portuguese explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo who first discovered the San Diego area.) We were intrigued by this facility -

so we did a little research. The SSC stands for SPAWAR Systems Command, which is short for Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, which according to their website is all about “transforming information into decisive effects”. Whatever that means. And who knows what it actually done in that building, but we thought it looked pretty interesting.
We also passed the Fort Rosecrans Cemetery -

Always beautiful. Always sobering.
At the very tip of the peninsula is the Cabrillo National Monument. We checked out the view, saw a video on tide pools and then went to check out the coastline. Since we hit it at high tide, there weren’t any tide pools, but we enjoyed the walk. I confess we didn’t actually see the monument and historic lighthouse since we were feeling a little pressed for time (and Gary was saying, “just how many monuments and lighthouses do you need to see in a lifetime?????”). But still, a very pretty spot!

Our drive then took us through Ocean Beach and over Mission Bay and on to Soledad Mountain in the La Jolla area. While I doubt it’s the hightest spot in the area, it certainly afforded some beautiful views. Also, at the top of the mountain is the Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorial, with of all things, a 43 ft. high cross to honor the nation’s fallen heros.

From Soledad Mountain we continued north to University of California, San Diego (UCSD). It wasn’t exactly on the “Scenic Drive”, but we decided to drive through the HUGE campus.

Our little guide had made particular note of the “magnificent library that is located in a eucalyptus grove and is a spectacular sight”. We spotted a sign for it, tracked it down, and while it wasn’t anything like what I was expecting, it certainly was spectacular….

(My driver’s comment was – “Maybe this is why California is broke!”)
From UCSD, we began our drive back down toward downtown. But oh, the sights along the way -


And whether we were driving through Ocean Beach or La Jolla or Pacific Beach, the drive was lovely!

We ended our day in Old Town State Historic Park which represents San Diego’s Hispanic heritage from 1821 to 1872 when that area was the center of San Diego. (Yes, I copied that from the guide paper.)

It was fun to walk around, check out some of the living history “stuff”, and enjoy a couple of expensive tacos. By then we were beat – and decided the rest of the tour (Hillcrest, Balboa Park, San Diego Zoo, Gaslamp Quarter to name a few) would have to wait for another day.
Aside from a few tense moments as we attempted to follow the directions on our little 50 cent scenic tour guide and managing to hit the 4:30PM Friday traffic heading out of the city, it was a very fine day indeed. And just today one of our fellow SOWERs stopped by to see if we would be interested in 2 passes to the Zoo! Whoohoo! At $35.00/ea you bet we’re interested! So there will certainly be more San Diego adventures for us!

PS – I consolidated some of the pictures into groupings, but if you would like to see them as individual photos you can check them out HERE.

Have a blessed Lord’s Day!

Now some of you know that November is one of my favorite months because my birthday lands in it. In fact, we often refer to November as my Birthday Month, because I pretty much try to celebrate all month long. But November is a grand month for other reasons too – Thanksgiving is waiting there at the end of the month, and back when we had our home, that holiday was always filled with lots of family and fun. Each year since we’ve been on the road Thanksgiving has had a different flavor, but each one was very special in its own way. Another good thing about November is that Christmas is “in the air”, but it hasn’t taken over every store and airwave. Quite. Yet. But the best part of November is really about the Birthdays. Because as our family has grown, so have the number of November birthdays.
It used to be that November was mine, all mine. That was pretty long ago, though, since we’ve been saying Happy Birthday to BIL Fitz for about 40 years and SIL Sharon for about 35. Then 5 years ago we added dear Hayley to the family and just two years ago along came Madelyn Sage. This year we also got to say hello to another new family member – my new great-nephew, Noah, born November 17th.

But there are some other dear folks that I share my November birthday-month with. (Or should I say, with whom I share my birthday month? ) My birthday buddies, Connie and Bonnie, and I have been meeting together sometime during November for as long as I can remember. We go back a long way – back to those having babies days. We each had baby girls in 1976 and watched our lives intertwine over the years. Almost 30 years ago I moved out of the “neighborhood”, and although I was only about 15 miles down the road, our young family eventually found a church closer to home and we lost some of the easy connectivity that we had been used to. But still, we stayed in touch and somehow, perhaps wordlessly, committed to getting together at least once a year during our birthday month regardless of how much we saw (or didn’t see) each other otherwise. And as we got older and life got busier, we found that our once a year gatherings was one of our best days of the year. We would worship together, go out for lunch, and end up at Connie’s for birthday cake and catch-up. We did a lot of laughing, a fair bit of crying, and some serious praying. We saw each other through some rough patches in our marriages, a divorce, open-heart surgery, the death of our parents and some dear friends, and lives that sometimes seemed to be spinning out of control. We rejoiced with weddings and grandbabies, celebrated milestone birthdays, and reminisced about days gone by. These dear women have been my safe place. And even when we only met for that one day of the year, it was as if no time at all had gone by. Since we’ve been on the road, we haven’t actually been able to meet during November. But by and large we’ve done pretty well at getting together whenever I land in town. It’s been a while, though, since I’ve been back in town. And as November comes to a close, I’m missing you, my dear sisters in Christ.

Hope YOUR birthday month was filled with folks that you love, and that the year ahead is full of blessings.
And I PROMISE we’ll be eating cake together before the next November comes around!

We spent our Thanksgiving day on the road. But since it was almost all New Road, it was still a very good day! (And we did get to talk to our kids and we have a turkey ready to roast tomorrow, so there will still be leftovers!). We were only going about 200 miles from the Coachella Valley down the east coast of the Salton Sea, south to El Centro and then west along the bottom of the state (almost into Mexico) and then a little north to swing around to Jamul (there are mountains in the way of actually getting there more directly). Here is what it looks like on a map -

Here’s what it looked like as we drove it -
Down past the Salton Sea

The north end of the Salton Sea is in the Imperial Valley – a real fruit (and vegetable) basket area of California. This field was ready for something!

Although the Salton Sea is increasing in it’s salinity each year (along with becoming more poluted), it is still home to about 30% of the the remaining American White Pelicans.

(If you’d like to know more about this lake (the largest in CA) there is some info Here on Wikipedia.)
We soon left the lake behind us and continued through the desert – but we knew that mountains were in our future!


Oh, yeah, mountains ahead. We were going from about 300 ft. below sea level to over 4000 ft. above sea level. Not the highest pass we’ve traveled by any means, but believe me, it was one long climb!



And what goes up, must come down -

and down -

and down.
We passed some majestic windmills along the way -

and pretty much continued to wind up and down and over and through mountain after mountain.

We eventually made it to the outskirts of The Big City – but I bet you can all picture Thanksgiving traffic. It wasn’t very photo worthy.
We finally settled down in parking lot near a Kohls in El Cajon. We figured if they asked us to move we would just say we were waiting for it to open at 4AM. Fortunately, no one bothered us so we didn’t have to actually get up and do it! (But I must say, many others did! And without the comfort of having their bed in the parking lot!).

Today we moved into our December project – Indian Hills Camp. We haven’t seen too much of the camp just yet, but I can share with you my new picture window view -

I don’t think we’re done being thankful just yet!