The Great San Diego Trip

My cousin’s daughter was recently married in Temecula, California.  It was to be a wonderful family gathering and it’s California: what’s not to like?  We made our plans, packed up and went.

The truly glorious VRBO.

Our family met up with my sister’s and we rented a lovely VRBO in Oceanside. Each kid got her own bedroom, it accommodated us all comfortably, and it had a wonderful ocean view.  The whole front opened up and we enjoyed the gorgeous ocean panoramic view and sea breeze.  It was perfect. Heaven.  We spent that whole first day together talking, laughing and enjoying the view and salty air. We brought in In-N-Out Burgers for lunch.  I can’t remember the last time I felt so relaxed. I just wanted to stay like that forever.  But we had one more free day, and then the wedding to attend.

On our free day we decide to drive down the coast to various beaches and bluffs, get out and enjoy the sand between our toes and the sound of the waves.  It was warm and sunny and couldn’t be any better.  Until . . . I came down with a 48 hour GI bug.  At a beach bathroom with no toilet paper and no lock on the door.  There was nothing good about any of it.

We made it back to the rental and I spent the next 48 hours in abject misery while everyone else went off to a fabulous wedding and a family get-together.  Everything I had been looking forward to.  I didn’t even see my sister and her family for those two days, let alone cousins, kids, relatives and the happy couple.  I barely pulled myself together enough to fly home and collapse again when I got here.

Faking feeling good as we headed home.

I had had hopes.  Carlsbad, just down the coast for Oceanside and north of San Diego, has a flower farm. That’s an understatement. It’s the last big commercial flower farm left in southern California. It’s not just a farm, it’s eternal fields of every color of flower in neat and endless rows. When we were little, my grandparents lived in Carlsbad and in the spring we would drive out and look at the tulips.  Tulips as far as eye can see.  In those days, you would just drive out to the area and stop along the road. Now it’s practically an amusement park, but still the endless flowers are there.  I’ve dreamt of going back and seeing them again, but alas it was not to be.

The (also) glorious flower fields in Carlsbad.

But speaking of weddings and agriculture . . .  two years ago, one of my cousin’s other daughters was married in the Central Valley of California – basically the more rural and agricultural towns outside of Fresno that grows half the table food in the nation. That was also a lovely wedding, and we had a couple of days there. For that one I was perfectly happy and healthy.  We spent time with family we hadn’t seen in a decade or more, danced, ate great bar-b-que, had fun and enjoyed a beautiful evening.

In most of California, except for the mountains, winter is barely January and into February.  That’s when you get the rains, and if you have roses (which grow GREAT in California) you trim and feed them in mid-to-late February. But the Blossom Trail is something else. I love the Blossom Trail.

I downloaded these, but you get the idea.

You know California’s Central Valley is all about agriculture,  and the Blossom Trail, in particular, is at the height of blooming fruit and nut trees in February: 14 varieties of apricots, 100 varieties of peaches and nectarines, 9 varieties of almonds and 25 plum varieties. Not to mention apples and citrus, including lemons and oranges.  You simply drive down these farmland roads and are flanked by innumerable rows of blooming trees. There is every shade of pink and white, and it’s magical.  The trees are covered in petals and the ground below is blanketed in them; the petals float down from the trees like snow.  It's a wonderland beyond what you can imagine.

Blossoms, blossoms everywhere.

There is a map and signs to follow, and it’s easy to spend four hours driving the roads (slowly) and hopping out to look at different orchards and intersections.  Of course you are not supposed to pick any of the fruit, but we found an orange that had come off the tree and was sitting on the ground, but not spoiled.  We divided the sections among us and while I like orange flavor (as in sherbet and orange chocolate), I can’t stand the fibrous-ness of actual oranges.  But I have to tell you, that section of orange I ate was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.  It tasted like sunshine, sweet and fresh. It was unbelievable.

Really big trees, and heavy laden, top to bottom.

When I was little, we went camping up in the Sequoias, and somehow on the way we drove through all of this, back in the early 70s.  It was well past blossoming season and they were just orchards of green tress, with little signs on each field showing what was growing.  It caught my fancy and I’d always wanted to go back and see the blooms, and I finally did.

And at some point, you have to call it a day and head back to the house.

So my cousin has three daughters: one wedding gave us the Blossom Trail, another wedding gave us the Carlsbad Flower Fields (even if I didn’t see them), and the third was married in Hawaii, which we weren’t able to attend. This is such a good streak that I wish she had more daughters to bring us to more beautiful places.

San Diego was a bust for me, but family and blossoms of any kind never are.  The beach will never get old, and the Pacific Ocean with the endless horizon and setting sun is my happy place. It’s what I think about when I want to relax or if I’m going to have my blood pressure taken. I have a video on my phone of just the waves rolling in, and I pull it up when I need a dose of peace. 

I will finish with a different perspective though.  When we were kids and went to Huntington Beach for swimming and play, we’d always come home with bits of black tar all over the bottoms of our feet. It was impossible to scrub off, and I’m sure it just slowly wore off on the carpet and our bedsheets over the next few days, but we never thought about it.  My mom said it was because of the naturally occurring oil in ocean. I accepted that as truth.

Kinda pretty, don't you think?

My whole life we’d look out from the beach and there would be oil platforms off-shore, with pretty lights.  It never occurred to me that they weren’t supposed to be there – I just thought they were twinkly.  But now I never get tar on my feet.  My mom is long gone, but I’d like to go back and tell her:  no, that is not just naturally occurring oil that seeps out of the ground.  I can’t believe that from time immemorial the ocean floor leached oil and then it stopped sometime between 1976 and 2020.  No, clearly the oil platforms had leaky pipes and we were getting raw oil on our feet.  We don’t seem to have suffered for it, but it’s just one of those quirks I grew up with and never really questioned.  And, to be honest, I still like the pretty lights and it would be kind of cool to get tar on my feet one last time.