The La Brea Tar Pits are extraordinary. I don’t know any other museum that is an active paleontological research site, where methane gas fills your nose, tar fills your outsoles (if you don’t watch your step), and discoveries are made daily, about the ice age. Crude oil seeps up from about 1,000 feet deep, and …
Wilderness Gardens County Preserve is considered a SWAP (Small Wilderness Area Preserve), which provides a ‘mechanism by which people can preserve important natural areas of undeveloped land or small wilderness areas for the use and benefit of the general public.’ Thank goodness for forward thinkers. We, the general public, appreciate having the open space, with …
Yellow Post Site 6 is our new favorite mountain camping spot. Before heading home we warmed up with a fire and some delicious aeropress coffee, took our last swings in the hammock, enjoyed some bird watching, and visited our favorite oak trees at the top of the Ramona Trail. Now it is time to pass …
It was a cold evening, followed by a cold day in Yellow Post Site 6. We enjoyed bird watching in the morning, followed later bird food watching. (Our favorite was the pseudoscorpion.) We walked up the fire road to the summit of Thomas Mountain, for views in every direction. There is a lot of nature …
There is nothing better than Yellow Post Site camping in the San Bernardino National Forest. It feels so far from home, even though it is just two and a half hours away. Yellow Post Sites are unique to the San Bernardino National Forest. They are free, backcountry, first come, first serve camp sites, marked with …
Just thirty minutes from our home base in Oceanside, perched on a cliff overlooking La Jolla Shores, sits Birch Aquarium at Scripps (a public outreach center for UCSD’s Scripps Institute of Oceanography). The Aquarium was established in 1903. Its name was later changed to Scripps in order to honor financial supporters Ellen Browning Scripps and …
The San Diego Society of Natural History is the oldest scientific institution in Southern California. In just two years the organization will celebrate its sesquicentennial (and 150 years of scientific contributions). The current location of the San Diego Natural History Museum is its fourth in Balboa Park, purchased in 1933 with contributions from local philanthropist, …
In 1945, the USS Midway was commissioned as the largest ship in the world. It slowly became the longest serving aircraft carrier in the 20th century. A half century after it was commissioned (eons as far as technology is concerned) the ship was decommissioned, but that is not all she wrote. Twelve years later the …
I grew up a few miles from the Santa Rosa Plateau, so it feels like home hiking here. Nowadays there are volunteers protecting the area (so we have to leave our rain boots at home… no haphazardly trudging through the protected vernal pools like it is the early 1980s). Some time has passed since we …
Vanillina, fettuccine, prosciutto, pancetta, gelato, cannelloni, panuozzo napoletano, pesto e più are packed like sardines into Ciao Marketplace in Vista. The marketplace, which includes a delicatessen, a bakery and gelateria, has whatever you are looking for to remind you of your last trip to Italy. It sits right in the middle of Ciao Ristorante, an …