After a couple of days hanging around the campground, we decided to head back into the city. We visited Old Town, which seems to be the oldest part of settled San Diego and likely California. Not sure what we were getting into, we eventually found a touristy part and a state park, which is like a combination of Living History Farms and tourist shops. It was fun.
Sometimes, life in California is surprisingly cool. This evening we had some shopping to do, so we went to a strip mall, so we thought. After looking at a few stores we realized that we were at an actual mall – it was just open-air. It was cool, like eating outside at Costco. I could get used to this.
Yesterday after we moved across the park we headed to Coronado Island, a small town just outside San Diego, right on the coast. It is a beautiful town with a luxurious old hotel where people were ice skating. It was fun to watch the ice skating, especially because Californians don’t spend much time ice skating.
We spent the afternoon at the beach and then we were planning on watching a boat parade through San Diego Bay, but Lucia was not feeling well so we headed home. Lucia definitely had something going on for a few hours, but by bedtime she was nearly back to herself.
This weekend we moved from Las Vegas to San Diego. It was about a 6 hour drive, that took us 7 hours because we had to stop for the bathroom and gas. We are staying at Pio Pico, which is an RV campground southeast of the city only half of the park has sewer, so Saturday night we stayed on the non-sewer side and on Sunday there was a crossover process where we could find a site on the sewer side, which we did.
Valley of Fire State Park is about an hour outside of Las Vegas, and it is awesome. It seemed like a combination of Arches National Park and The Wave, outside of Kanab, Utah. We went on a few short hikes: Elephant Rock, Fire Wave, White Domes, and Mouse’s Tank. We all had a fun time exploring and taking in the views.
Disclaimer: Pictures don’t do this place justice, at least not with our phone cameras.
It has been a long 24 hours. I haven’t posted much about our car troubles, but we have had more work than we were planning on. In the past 2 months we have had to fix 2 fuel leaks. Yesterday when we drove in to Vegas I thought we had another. This caused some stress as we are tired of spending money on the car. We talked about it before bed and came up with an action plan for today.
Then the winds came. There were crazy wind gusts last night that were shaking our whole RV and making a lot of noise. Neither Susan nor I slept very well, and I had to get up early for work. I was tired.
I ended up taking the car in to the shop this morning and they located the leak and it turned out to be the transmission gasket. They were able to fix that, change my oil, and replace some worn out parts in the front suspension faster and cheaper than the appointment I have scheduled in San Diego next week, which I can now cancel. Also, they had blazing fast internet, which is awesome.
I pretty much spent the work day there, came home, and then took the kids to the park. There is a park here in Boulder city where bighorn sheep like to hang out. Today there were 50, just grazing on the lawn. It was a cool site and a nice way to wind down after some stressful times.
Today after work we went back to the Strip. We spent most of the time exploring the mall at Caesar’s Palace, The Forum Shops, where we did some shopping at H&M and shared a piece of cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory.
Today after work we headed into Las Vegas. I have never been there before and I was excited to see what all of the hype is about. I was actually really impressed with the strip. We parked at the Bellagio, walked to Excalibur, and then back to Bellagio to see the fountains.
We spent a fair amount of time in M&M World and also got a treat at the Hershey store. Overall, good time. We are planning on going back later in the week.
It took us about 5 hours to drive from Menifee, CA to Las Vegas. There were a couple of stretches that were very windy, so aside from being nerve-racking we also had to drive very slowly.
We are staying about 30 minutes southeast of Las Vegas, near the Hoover Dam.
We had the whole day free today so we decided to trek it to the beach. We love the beach and the weather looked good. We had to drive about 90 minutes to get there from where we are staying. There is a beach that would have been a little closer, but it was impacted by a wildfire so we decided to stay a little farther north.
We went to Doheny Beach which is a state park in Dana Point. It was a beautiful beach with volleyball players, surfers, and a cute cafe right on the beach. It was a fun day.
This evening we attempted to visit Old Town Temecula, the downtown of one of the cities near where we are staying. Apparently we aren’t the only ones. The place was completely packed, so we headed to the modern-day town square, Costco.
