Guest blogger coming up, maybe

Well first, the guest blogger thing. My nephew the artist Nathan is heading for New Zealand in the middle of January, and I invite him to blog his trip here on my travel blog. So watch for that.

Me? I haven't been traveling much. We made the move and we settled in. We had the anniversary trip, previous post, and if you want to know the truth we actually had a fight as we were leaving Santa Barbara and hardly spoke all day on the train ride home. After 50 years! Yes, fights still happen. But that evened out, as it always does. (Of course I was right, by the way.) That's the nice thing about 50 years. You've put in so much time, you put these things in perspective.

Well we have been to Sacramento and Petaluma, the week before Thanksgiving. Even though I swore I would not travel I-5 again, we took the car. Had a good time with dear friends in Sacramento and dear kids/grandkids in Petaluma. Traffic jam on the way home on the 210 through Pasadena and east that we could have done without. Then Thanksgiving the next weekend in Palm Desert with sister-in-law and four nieces. And that's about it for the road, except to look for an independent bookstore which required going all the way to Del Mar.

Have I mentioned that Southern California is everything I remembered from my kid days? We had a spate of serious rain (some folks even got flooded) but mostly it's been lovely. It's my climate and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

Okay, next trip is the Sacramento/Petaluma thing again, NOT driving, and I will report on what it is like to take the Amtrak bus to Bakersfield from LA and then up the Valley on the San Joaquin. I go first and spend two nights with Judy (sometimes known as Eeyore) in Sacramento and then catch another train and a thru-way bus to Petaluma, and meet up with the old guy there. We'll be spending a week at sesshin, which is a Buddhist retreat, in Santa Rosa and then another weekend with the kids before training home.

This is probably boring in the planning stages, but maybe there will be adventures to report. And we are talking about going back to Bequia (St. Vincent and the Grenadines) for three weeks in May, when the off-season hits. So you'll hear more about that. Frequent flyer miles and off-season rates, a very reasonable way to go. Now that we live in Lotus Land we don't have to escape in the winter. Thank you very much.

50 Years and Counting

In October of 1960 we got married in Altadena on a Friday afternoon, in the back yard of the house where I grew up, and then went out for Chinese food, just the two of us newlyweds. I remember we kept holding our left hands up side by side, admiring our new matching gold bands, so I suppose anyone observing us could have guessed what we'd been up to that day. The plan was to drive to Santa Barbara for Friday and Saturday nights, because Mike had to be back at work on Monday. It's about 100 miles. But we got a late start and stayed in Ventura or Oxnard the first night. That left us with a one-night honeymoon at the beach. I remember we ate fried scallops and chips from a beachside fast food place, sitting at a picnic table, and I have never managed to replicate that experience. I suspect -- no, by now I'm sure -- that it wasn't just the scallops.

Last week we commemorated the 50th anniversary of that weekend by returning to Santa Barbara, this time for three nights and no work to come back to. It was actually next door to the place we stayed in 1960! This one was nicer though, and a great internet special price that made it cheaper too. We're not that sentimental.

The fast food fish place is gone. But there are so many wonderful restaurants, and we took advantage. There's a walk around the yacht harbor to the end of the breakwater, and lots of the recovering population of brown pelicans are in view. The wharf is another nice water walk. And the famous El Paseo mall, smack in the middle of downtown, is beautifully laid out with elegant architectural deail. Santa Barbara is unusual in having such a complete downtown mall, with Nordstrom's and Macy's as anchors. There's a 25¢ shuttle from the foot of the wharf that traverses State Street every 15 minutes or so.

This is only one of the blooming things we saw as we walked the blocks inland from the beach, on our way to and from downtown. Maybe it's the most exotic one, but there are huge hibiscus everywhere, and hundreds of other blooming bushes, and ancient trees with thick trunks, just practically a jungle.

We didn't drive this time. A local bus stops just outside our driveway, and it delivered us to the Escondido Transit Center. From there a light rail line goes to Oceanside. From Oceanside we caught Amtrak's Surfliner to Santa Barbara, and ended up in walking distance from our hotel. It excites my imagination that I can roll my bag out my front door and go anywhere in the world, because there's a frequent shuttle from the train at Union Station in L.A. directly to LAX. It makes me feel viscerally connected.

What happens in reality is a little bit of a drag though -- the romance of the rails isn't so romantic on these commuter runs. It's important to have a book. The 15 miles or so to the coast from Escondido takes an hour on the light rail, because there are 15 stops. The Surfliner train is packed, and in order to get seats together we had to sit backwards, because single individuals take up at least half of the forward facing seats. You have to try not to be irritated by that. We spent the whole way from Oceanside to Los Angeles watching for a chance to get seats together where we could face forward, and at about Anaheim we succeeded. Guess what. In LA the train changes direction on the way out of the station and goes in reverse. On the way home again we just sat backwards from Santa Barbara to L.A., because we knew the game.

But here's the thing. You don't have to drive. You don't have to drive through Los Angeles! And the travel times are very close -- 5-6 hours. The round trip price is good, especially if you are old enough to be celebrating your 50th anniversary.

Too much mall travel

The days have been filled with moving in and getting settled chores, and the only traveling we've done once we made the third and final drive down I-5 from Bellingham WA to Escondido CA is shopping. We've done serious Ikea shopping, and hardware stores, and have spent way too much time in parking lots. I do have a few favorite stores, and my sister-in-law who lives here has introduced me to a cool consignment place called Debra's, where I found the Mexican pottery cat who now presides over our living room.

But yesterday we went on a non-retail outing (although we ended up at the mall, again, looking for lunch and chairs). Kit Carson Park in the south part of Escondido is one of those sprawling regional parks, almost 300 acres, with trails and ponds and picnic tables. And all those trees that brought me back here -- eucalyptus and pepper trees, sycamore and live oak. Those silhouettes, and those smells.

We walked a bit, around the aboretum (not much developed), and hidden away in the middle is Queen Califia's Magic Circle. I don't yet have the words for this. Overwhelming. Here's an image hint, but there's so much more. Like they say, you kinda have to be there. You need to walk through and look closely, see the details, and touch stuff. I think I will go back soon and sit on one of the curvy mosaic benches in the shade and try to get my words around it. If you are in Escondido, maybe to see the Wild Animal Park, it's right on your way from San Diego.

Well it's March. The last post was May. Sorry about that. In the meantime we canceled our winter trip to Arizona for a medical difficulty, decided we should think about where we would want to be "stuck" if something more serious came along, like being way too old to travel, and shopped for a new place in Escondido, CA, the place that feels the most like home to me even though I never actually lived there (but my mom was born there), and are in the process of relocating. More later. I never thought I'd have these great tile floors. Yep, they're mine.