Phoenix

Bagpipes from Poland

Most of Friday was spent on the road headed to Phoenix for Lisa Dierschow’s wedding on Sunday. The temperatures are above 100 again after all that nice San Diego weather. We made it to our campsite at Mesa Spirit RV Resort about 4 PM. This place is huge, but largely deserted at this time of year. It looks like they have lots of Senior activities that start up in about 2 weeks. Saturday, we picked up Lisa and Gary at the airport, did a little shopping and went out to dinner with the Dierschows.

            Today, we went to church, then after breakfast headed to the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix. This was a great complement to the Grammy museum. Here they have examples of musical instruments from six continents and videos of those instruments either being made or played. As you approach each exhibit, your headphones switch to that video. We easily spent three hours there. The surprises were the variety of bagpipes that we found in Europe, South America and Northern Africa as well as the huge variety of basic string instruments and horns, many with unique shapes.

Lisa and Aaron

            Lisa’s wedding was at 5 PM. It was a nice ceremony, not very religious, but some nice symbolism like mixing two colors of sand. The reception was held immediately after. Since it was a small wedding, we ended up being the dancing fools for the evening.

San Diego Zoo Safari Park

Northern White Rhino

We arrived at the San Diego Zoo Safari park at about 10 AM in the morning and managed to spend almost the entire day here. Of course, at everyone’s recommendation we took the African safari tram ride – it proved a lot easier to find animals here than in Africa. What we saw in much more abundance here than in the wild were rhinoceros. The park is particularly known for having success breeding rhinos as well as some other difficult to breed animals with the eventual goal of returning them to the wild in many cases. For rhinos the trick was to have lots of females, who need to be in small herds, called a crash, to breed successfully. But for the Northern White Rhino the end is near, only eight individuals exist in the world, one of which is here.

Asian Rhino

            We also spent a little more money to do a cart tour of the Asian animals. This proved well worth it, since we saw a lot of animals we had never seen before. For example, the Asian Rhino which has panels of skin on its backside, the only true wild horse remaining from Mongolia as well as camels from there. Then these beautiful white oryx from Saudi Arabia which are endangered, but still hunted there. These could well have led to the legends about unicorns.

            After our tour, the zoo staff was showing off a serval and caracal. This cat with tufted ears was beautiful and did some interesting leaps into the air to show how he might attack his prey. We walked through lagoon areas with lots of birds, toward the gorilla’s where we were introduced to a young one being closely watched by its mother. By now it was about 3PM and Mary was tired, but we wanted to see the tigers. Well it was a long walk, up and down hills, and in the end we didn’t see a single tiger. A disappointing ending to a great day.

            We drove about 50 miles outside San Diego to Lake Morena RV Park, a county park at about 3500 feet in altitude. What a nice secluded (there isn’t even a radio signal) park near a reservoir.

Personnal Tour of San Diego

Torrey Pines

Flo and Bill gave us a personalized tour of the San Diego shoreline. We started with brunch at one of their favorite restaurants, Americana, in Del Mar. Then we headed off for Torrey Pines Reserve. Torrey pines only live in 2 places in the world: this area around San Diego and the island of Santa Rosa. Bill and Flo serve as docents at this park and they pointed out all the highlights along the loop trail we took to see the pines, canyon, and ocean. Then we were off to the glider port, where people were launching on a parasail or model gliders were flying in the constant winds coming from the ocean. Bill has his own gliders which he flies here. Further down the coast we stopped at La Jolla to see the harbor seals which are taking over a beach meant for children to wade in the ocean. We had a interesting explanation from the ranger on how they are trying to provide a reasonable compromise between use of the beach by people and seals. Our final stop was Cabrillo National Monument, which is at the entry to San Diego Bay, commemorating Cabrillo’s journey up the California coast in 1542 to claim this land for Spain. Today, the old Point Loma Lighthouse dominates the point and from here you can see the bay and the large Naval installation on North Island. Finally, we traveled south along the bay, passing the Hotel del Coronado to end our sightseeing for the day. We headed back toward our camp at ate a delicious Mexican meal near our campground. It was a great tour by our hosts with lots of interesting sights. 

Parasails using the winds

On to San Diego

9 Key Leaders in Nixon's time

We began our day at the Nixon Presidential Library and ended up spending 3 hours here. We started with a tour of the highlights by a docent, which really was a great way to see this place, then saw the movie about Nixon (created while he was still alive, so he made many comments about his own life), and finally, we visited a few highlights to learn more about his years between the Vice Presidency and running for President in 1968, his major policies during office, and the Watergate investigation. One comes away with a great sense of how he changed the world by meeting with many world leaders to make the world a more peaceful place, the Chinese in particular. What was shocking was to see the role reversal of Democrats and Republicans over the years. Nixon created the EPA for example, and proposed a national health system, while the Democrats opposed both.  The Watergate section was brand new, created by the National Archives rather than the Nixon Foundation. It was interesting to walk through the timeline – how he misused FBI and CIA resources at first to find the leakers of the Pentagon Papers, but later against his political opponents. They showed how the 18 minute gap in the Presidential tapes couldn’t have been done accidentally, because there was evidence of multiple erasures. Even today, with more sophisticated techniques, we can’t recover what was on those tapes.

The Stone Church, San Juan Capistrano

            After lunch, we visited our last mission for this trip, San Juan Capistrano. It really was the highlight of the missions. From the ruins of the original stone church, which was built in 1797 and destroyed in the 1812 earthquake to the Serra Chapel, this is the oldest chapel in continuous use of all the missions.

            We then headed to South Carlsbad State Beach for our camping site. Scrunched between the old Highway 101 and the beach, there are camping sites on both sides of the park. We would get to fall asleep to the Ocean tonight (after 101 quieted down).

View from our campsite

            We met Flo and Bill for dinner that night. It was really great to meet with old friends, friends we originally met on our trip to Peru. It’s amazing how coming from very different backgrounds, we really enjoy each others company. They have a beautiful house a few blocks up from the ocean. We were particularly impressed with the kitchen. Tomorrow they are taking us around the San Diego area.

Disney's California Adventure

Today is the day for our regular Disney fix. We’re headed to California Adventure, the newest of the Disney theme parks. The crowds seemed huge most of the day until about 3 PM, even though it’s a Monday in September. Most of the rides are similar to those in Disney World: Soaring, Toy Mania, Muppet Vision, It’s Tough to be a Bug. That didn’t stop up from enjoying our favorites, we did Toy Mania twice, plus the others. There were a lot of unique kid rides, especially in bug land. We were thrilled by California Screaming, their one roller coaster and were disappointed in Luigi’s Flying Tires – a bumper car ride on air that was fairly slow moving and hard to operate. The hits of the day were the live musical, Aladdin, where the Genie was particularly funny with lines out of the latest news and World of Color at the end of the day. This was a fantastic show on the waterfront using lots of effects on water: colored lighting, lasers, and projecting various of the Disney animations on walls of water. Of course, the sound system projected great music and effects too. Mary was a trooper throughout. We knew this was going to be a rough, long day for her, after her toe surgery. But she survived a lot of standing and walking.