On December 27th (my Mom's birthday), Bill and I drove to Miramar Marine Air Station in San Diego, CA to pick Matt up for his 10 day leave. I was so excited to find out that he wanted to spend his entire vacation with us! I hope he doesn't come to regret that. We don't live a very exciting life here.
Anyway, the original plan was to bring the whole family on a little Southern California mini vacation. In the end, Bill and I decided to leave the kids on their own for a few days and go alone. We really needed the alone time. Actually, I really needed it. And the cost of the trip would have been much higher if taking everyone. It was right after Christmas and $ was short. It also meant we didn't have to find a neighbor to take care of the animals while we were away.
I was a little nervous about leaving the kids for 3 days. Only a little. Despite all the frustrations lately, I know that I have really high class kids and that we live in a very safe neighborhood.
On the way south, Bill spotted this neat atmospheric effect and asked me to take a picture of it. He called it a 'sun dog'. The large bright spot is the sun. The smaller one is the 'sun dog' as part of a corona around the sun. It looks like a Hollywood movie effect!
The traffic was great until we reached Las Vegas. That is when the freeway turned into a parking lot! We crawled forward at 5-20 miles per hour until about 15 miles into California! In fact, the traffic was so bad, several people decided to take matters into their own hands and left the freeway! They found an open gate to the power line access road and went buck boarding along at about the same rate as the freeway. I guess off-roading was preferable even if it wasn't much faster.
We had reserved a room at the Miramar Inn; an on base hotel. It didn't cost any less than the off base choices, but the atmosphere was very different! The weather in San Diego is so nice year round that the hotel hallways were actually breezeways! The only secure doors were the room doors. Everything felt very safe, though. The feeling of complete security was something that we would never have found off base. Everyone in the Ready Room (the complimentary breakfast room) was very friendly. We all knew that we had the Marines in common.
This is a picture of Matt at the on base McDonald's. We ended up eating a couple of meals there. It was just convenient and cheap.
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