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!!!