A Little Downtime in Southern California

A little time off the bikes, the generous loan of Grandpa Jerry's classy car
Visits to friends and family.
TLC that we store away, for future times to drawn upon.

A time of tuning bikes
Baking treats : muffins, scones, pies and oven meals
A real down time.
When thoughts of where we'll rest our heads, or cleanse our bodies, or fill our water bottles
Are absent.

We've really had a time to let our hair down.
Ride a roller coaster
Eat burgers and bowl (the bumpers up for the kids certainly helped the adult scores!)
And...plan our next point of attack.
Death Valley to Joshua Tree


Tarn dictates, Oct 15
At Grandma Susan's I always stayed on the floor. Sampson always stayed on the bed. Markos always stayed in the closet. We always played with the Duplo blocks and we played with cement and rock blocks. We went apple picking and we went to the creek. We went bowling. It was fun. We went to somebody else's house and they stayed at home and we went to Sea World and we went on a roller coaster. I did not like it. I thought it was going to be fun but it wasn't. I do not want to go again.

Markos' journal, October 12
At The Beach: We played with Brad's beach toys and made tunnels for water to come through. We pored the water from the bucket. It was sunny and nice today. There were lots of surfers and some were using paddles. The big waves washed in lots of kelp.

Sampson writes, October 13
Sea World: Today we went to Sea World and our friend gave us free tickets. Then we went to park and boy was the parking lot big! After that we went by the ticket posts, the tickets were seventy dollars. I'm glad we got tickets for free. Then Dad got on the phone and we looked at the map. Later we went to a sea lion exhibit and watched a sea lion story/trick. It was really funny. Then we started walking to the killer whale exhibit. On the way we saw some dolphins and sea turtles. We almost got to touch them. After the dolphins we went to the Shamu exhibit and watched a Shamu show. It was cool because the people were really strong swimmers. They stood up on Shamu's nose and fed all the orca whales fish. The whales splashed the first sixteen rows. They did back flips and jumped out of the water all the way. Later we did a ride that was really fun, we went up and down and sideways. Tarn didn't like it. After the ride we went to the Wild Arctic. It was cold but we saw a giant walrus and penguins, also some other arctic animals.