Less Than 2 Hours

One of the things that I like about living here in southwest Riverside County is that we're so close to many other locales and getaways. In just about over an hour (depending on traffic), I can get back to Orange County or out to my family in Whittier, or down to San Diego. This helps to make life a little more interesting, for as nice as it can be here, it still often seems that there's precious little to do on the weekend. (I've been told a good fix for this problem is to get the children very involved in a sport, and then my weekends will be claimed and accounted for through the next 10 years. )

Add another hour to the trip, and things can get truly interesting -- for in just about 2 hours or less, we could be in Palm Springs, or up in the San Bernardino mountains, or out to the apple orchards of Julian, or even, I suppose, down south into Mexico.

2 of our getaways this summer were to Palm Springs, and up to Crestline/Arrowhead, in the S.B. mountains. The Palm Springs trip was a rare adult getaway, to celebrate our 11th anniversary. The mountain trip was just last weekend, and we camped with 3 other families at the Dogwood campground, between Crestline & Arrowhead.

This is where we stayed in Palm Springs:
The photos above were taken when my camera was accidentally set to this 1-color mode, and so half of our P.S. pictures look like this. Sort of cool and artsy, I think. But here's a shot of the true colors of the desert, and of our stay:

And this is half of me & Lily, up in the mountains:
This is actually part of a nice family shot, but I wanted to focus on the scenery itself -- here, we're up about 8,000 feet in elevation, at Keller Peak. There's a fire-lookout tower there that we climbed, and at the top, in addition to the awesome views, was a flock of very active hummingbirds, darting and diving for the feeders hanging way out there on the edge of the world.

Tomorrow begins the first day of the school year here in our district. I can't believe I'm the mom of a first grader. The summer flew -- well, summer itself will technically still be here for a good while -- but you know what I mean. We did parks and beaches and Las Vegas and tent camping and a sleep-over or two, board games and computer games and even a trip to the dreaded Chuck E. Cheese.

Busy days. But sometimes it was nicest to stay and play in our own little plot of backyard.
Despite everything I've written here, I'm still a might confused as to how we've blown through half of August already. I'm hoping to post a wee bit more often -- I'll have 2 days a week nearly completely to myself, what with Tucker in preschool -- and somewhere in between all the bon-bons and afternoon trysts and soap operas, you'd think I could squeeze in the blog now and then.

We'll just have to see.