Christmas and New Year's in San Diego

We hope everybody had a wonderful Christmas!  And here is to a fabulous New Year!  It's been wonderful visiting my mom and family here in San Diego.  It seems we have been just running around shopping for Christmas gifts and for food the whole time we've been here, and so we really haven't had a chance to do much else.  But we plan on going to Torrey Pines State Park on New Year's day and hiking there.  That will be a nice way to start the New Year!

We arrived here at Pio Pico Thousand Trails, Jamul, CA, on Saturday, the 20th.  We had planned on surprising my brother Kim for his birthday by showing up at the church he sings choir in.  But you know how it goes, the best laid plains and all of that.  He ended up getting too sick to sing, so we just decided to surprise him when he came over to Mom's house for his birthday dinner. 

The weird thing is that we sat around the table one night talking about scorpions, which happen to be in this area, and the next day I was in the public restroom and saw something crawling across the floor.  Having just talked about scorpions, I completely freaked out, as it did look like it could be a baby scorpion.  So I managed to get the courage up to take off my flip-flop and swat it.  Thinking I had killed a scorpion, I go the courage up to go back and take a picture.  Here it is:  

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• As wicked as the thing looks, it turned out to be just a Jerusalem grasshopper!

The weather has been really nice up until yesterday, when it started raining again, of course.  They are actually calling for snow!  Not down in San Diego, but up where we are, at an altitude of 3,700 feet.  We are hoping the roads are good today, as we are going to go to Mom's house for New Year's Eve and spend the night there so that we can get up early and go hiking at Torrey Pines State Reserve.

On another note, we finally got our FMCA (Family Motor Coach Association) plate that we've been waiting for.  It took over two months, but it is really nice.  The story behind that is that we are using Dave's parents' number that they had when they were RVing, which is 76,385.  Everybody else we see is in the 300,000s!  They put an "S" behind the 76,385, for son, and so I'm sure we'll be getting tons of inquiries about our low number.  Mom McGrath is very happy that their number lives on.   Here's a picture of the plate and our little Christmas tree.

We wish to all of you a wonderful new year filled with good health and much happiness!!!

Blog catch-up

Well, hello, everyone.  It's been awhile since we last checked in last.  Remote places and lack of Internet have kept us from blogging.  So here's a sum-up of the last couple of weeks:

We stayed in Morgan Hill from the 22nd of November until the 8th of December, and it felt like it was two months.  Morgan Hill Thousand Trails definitely does not make our favorite places to stay list.  But we did meet some wonderful people there, and we did have some good times.

We had the best day-trip ever, and it was to Monterey and Carmel By The Sea.  We LOVED it there, and it IS on our list of top places to return to.  Here are a couple of pictures that Dave took.

This one is of the Point Pinos Lighthouse, right past Monterey.  It was so quaint. 

This is a picture is a part of the Pebble Beach Golf Course that we saw as we were walking on the beach, down the street from the restaurant we ate at, Il Fornaio, the same restaurant we loved to eat at in Seattle.

Here is the beautiful sunset in Carmel.

And here is a picture of our new house on the beach in Carmel!

Yeah, just wishful thinking.  :)

From Morgan Hill, we drove to San Luis Opisbo and stayed at the Pacific Dunes Ranch.  We hiked along the cliffs of Bluffs Trail in Montana de Oso State Park.  It was really pretty.  We think we saw some whale waterspouts out in the ocean, but, unfortunately, not close enough to see the whales.

We also visited Morro Bay and the big rock.  That was really cool.  You could see the ocean pounding the big jetty they had built to protect the city, and we saw falcons on the big Morro Bay rock.  We also saw tons of seals in the water.

From San Luis Opisbo, we drove to Rancho Oso, in the foothills of Santa Barbara, right into a major storm that everybody has probably heard about that hit the coast, the likes of which California hadn't seen since 2009!!!  We had 50-mile-an-hour wind gusts and rain like we've never seen or heard before, and, of course, that brought with it, you guessed it, our second power outage.   I know California needs the rain, but, jeez, give us a break on this weather already!  But that's okay.  Dave and I had a great time, hunkering in and waiting for the storm to pass.  We brought in our slideouts, just to make sure the wind didn't tear off any of our awnings.

The next morning, this is what we awoke to!

We didn't get to see much of Santa Barbara, but we'll come back to this area again to visit.

We then drove the longest distance we have driven since we began this journey, 200 miles, to where we are now, Wilderness Resort, Menifee, CA.  We really like this place.  It's huge, with over 500 RV spots.  But, since we can't just pull into a place and have just a normal day, we were just getting  ready to settle down this morning and enjoy watching some football when, you guessed it, the electricity went out!!!  This time we have no idea what caused it, but we sure are getting suspicious that it's us!

Here's a picture of the welcoming committee in Menifee:

Okay.  So hopefully we won't take such a long time to update the blog.  We are heading to Pio Pico, near San Diego, to have a great Christmas and New Year's Eve visiting Kari's family.