scrapping the itenerary...

When we got to California we were completley exhausted the next day.

Chris and I looked at the expense of our plans and the fact that we had absolutley jam packed every second into the five days we were to be in Mission Beach with everything we could possibly think of.

Not that the plans weren't gonna be fun.

But they were going to be expensive.  Tres tres expensive.

And we could foresee exahusted grumpy-ness coming before we even started the vacation.

So we called it off.

We did things like walk around the area in which our rental house was settled in.  What a charming place it was too!  We were within barefoot balking distance of the beach, and the atmosphere was so completley chill and relaxed we instantly settled in on a routine.  Routine being....

Sleep til we woke up,

ate when we were hungry,

went to the beach when is sounded good.

The other things were kind of the break in routine.

AWESOME-ness.

We drove out to Ocean Beach to visit Hodad's that was on diners drive-ins and dives, and right at lunch with every other tourist from the US and beyond.  It was fun.  And really...the food?  MMMMMmmmmmMMMM.

And we went for a walk for a bit around the town...after all Chris

being a master parker of the Suburban in a non suburban friendly place

had found a good parking spot for 2 hours, we figured we should probably put it to good use.

So we went a strollin...

And what a colorful place it is.

I was so glad we had the chance to share some of this with the kids, although we could have spent three weeks in SoCal (San Diego to be specific) and still be finding stuff to do.

Karen was feeling lonely so we started her up and went for a "drive" (more of a I hope Karen knows where we are cuz I sure as heck don't recognize any of this stuff kind of a blind following the GPS kind of thing).

Some things were just the same....

Our first home.

We call it the Troy St. house.

It is almost exactly the same, except there wasn't anything growing in front of the house except for a

 yucky Yucca, and I tried to grow something...with no luck.

Then we drove to Lakeside.

O my.  We found the apartments we used to live in, but we felt like stalkers taking pictures when people were watching us in the parking lot so we moved on to what we call the

Lakeside House.

It HAD changed.

At some point it had been for the better, the carport had been turned into a garage, and an in ground swimming pool was outback.  The house had been stuccoed and a pretty tile roof put on.

Something had gone terribly wrong for someone, as the garage looked like someone had tried to shut the door on a car in the way, the yard was dead and horribly abused.  A beautiful security gate was now zip tied shut with a bank foreclosure notice on it, and it looked like someone had taken a crow bar to several spots.

It was sad.  And unrecognizable.  Really.

We drove by it four or five times with Karen the GPS blaring at us that we had missed the turn. 

Crazy.

Some things don't change a lot.  The kids were impressed, even though by the time we got to see the Temple it was at night, none of us could get a good pic and they were all kind of blurry.

We spent the rest of that night chasing down meds for poor Savannah, who apparently is allergic to something in California and was sick most every evening from all of her symptoms, and the OTC allergy medicine wearing off.