Mt. St. Helens

Mount St. Helens erupted at 8:32 Sunday morning, May 18, 1980. Shaken by an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale, the north face of this tall symmetrical mountain collapsed…

Sorry, Mt. Baldy

We neglected to post anything about our visit to Mt. Baldy on 7-7-07. While our hotel was taken over by a huge Filipino wedding party, we escaped north to this…

Mt. Shasta

Mt. Shasta, northern California, 14,161 ft. (4317 m)

Pea Soup

Best Western is a membership association of independently owned and operated hotels. (I looked this up, and it says so in their FAQs.) With more than 4,100 hotels in 80…

San Diego Wild Animal Park

Hmm. I wonder where they keep the bananas?The 1,800-acre Wild Animal Park is located north of San Diego near Escondido. Part of San Diego Zoo, the Wild Animal Park is…

San Diego Sunday

Our first California Coast dive was La Jolla Cove Ecological Preserve. If only we could have gotten a photo of ourselves in all the gear. Since we’re used to water…

Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo and his National Monument

Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo led the first European expedition exploring the what is now the US’s Pacific Coast. He arrived in San Diego bay in September of 1542 and declared it…

Punta Reyes National Seashore

San Francisco has lots to offer, and I’ll be sad to leave without eating my bread bowl of chowder and cioppino on Fisherman’s Wharf, but we again decided to use…

Joshua Tree National Park

“Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not…

Joshua Tree National Park

“Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not…