Camping at San Mateo Campgrounds - San Clemente, CA

Not really understanding the word ‘ironic’ the way some Europeans do, I would like to say that with all the fires raging on right now, I find it ironic that this entry is about camping. And not ironically at all, the campgrounds that I’m writing about is pretty damn close to be surrounded by flames.



Two weekends ago (I missed a weekend due to illness), a few of us went camping in San Mateo campgrounds near San Clemente. It’s the campgrounds we typically go to due to its proximity to the beach. San Mateo is actually the first campground I went to in California and the campground that got me over my hatred for camping.


You might have to strain to see it in this picture, but these guys playing football totally destroyed one of their tents from a pass from the 50 yard line.

When I was younger, camping was a big deal for my dad. He loved it. I have memories of camping in South Dakota with the buffalos. I have memories of the two week long summer trip camping up and down the Mississippi River. I even have memories of camping in butt ass cold weather every fall in Door County, WI. Every year we went camping SOMEWHERE, usually multiple times in a bunch of different weather. There were long hikes in the woods, swimming in mossy lakes, and bike rides on scenic paths.


Derek and Jamie

It was awful and I hated every single minute. What I remember is complaining about the long walks and bike rides. I remember crying buckets over having to take a shower with the june bugs. I remember holding a grudge that I was only allowed one s’more after dinner. And I remember every time it rained my tent flooded because I always set it up on a slight hill. The only thing I did like was collecting sticks for the fire, putting said sticks in the fire, and carving a stick for the marshmallows. Since that was all of an hours worth of fun, I was pretty miserable most of the time. What can I say; I was an indoor type of kid.


Andrea and Oliver

These miseries kept me from camping for a long, long time. When I was college age, friends from school would go on camping trips up in the Dells area. I always refused. I really hated camping that much. When I moved out to CA in 2000 I met up with a group that liked to go camping. I was hesitant at first, but agreed from the peer pressure. And you know what? It was awesome.


Derek and his sausage....and beans!

I never put two and two together in my head that if I went camping now, as an adult, I can do whatever I want. I don’t have to go for 18 mile walks if I don’t want to. I don’t have to shower with june bugs if I don’t want to. And I can certainly have as many damn s’mores as I wanted to (and beer for that matter!). I was hooked….

…to a degree. You can’t convince me to go on a camping trip where we have to hike up to the site with limited gear. I’m a car camper. I don’t care for pit toilets either, but I’ll deal with them if I have to. Just don’t ask me to crap in the woods.


A proper crapper is the flushing kind!

Anyhow, so we went camping a couple weeks ago. It was Derek, Ian, Ian’s little girl, Andrea, Andrea’s little boy, Kevin, and myself. Even though it rained on us the first night and I might have accidentally left both my pairs of shoes and hat out in the rain, it was fun. I ate too much as usual. I was fire-girl and kept the blaze going into the wee hours of the night (which in camping terms is like 11 o’clock). We never did go on our usual hike down to the beach (I claim tiredness due to child entertaining). I had a good time.


OK, totally awesome 'town in the dirt' that Oliver, Jamie and I built.

I’m hoping that San Mateo will survive the fires so that we can go again sometime.


And this is how you properly have a fire...

Fire!

A lot of family members have been calling me in the last few days to make sure that Kevin and I were alright (due to the fires). I suppose not posting here hasn’t helped the mystery at all so I thought I’d give you all a little update before my regular entry.

Kevin and I heard about the fire up in Malibu Sunday morning. We didn’t think too much about it as 1) Malibu is 65 miles away from us to the north and 2) with the extreme lack of rain we’ve had this year, fires are unfortunately inevitable.



Sunday night I was at home nursing my cold\sinus infection watching a bad movie I bought for $1.99 on Pay-Per-View (it was called ‘the Gold Diggers’…a PG rated movie with Cristina Ricci about two 13-year olds searching for gold in a mountain) (no matter how I phrase that it sounds bad, doesn’t it?) when Kevin called me up. He was out at our friends’ house having dinner and noticed some smoke on the horizon. He wanted to know if the news had anything about it.



Truthfully, I was so engrossed in my bad movie that I didn’t even notice the smoke. I walked outside and saw it immediately. The sky was black and orange and it smelled like a campfire. I went on the internet and saw that Santiago Canyon was on fire. Santiago Canyon is about 15 miles from our house in Costa Mesa, and a mere mile or two from where Kevin and I work in Irvine. Because of the Santa Ana winds, which are strong hot dry winds that blow west from the desert to the ocean, all the smoke and ash were coming our way. The winds were so strong it sounds like a ghostly freight train was blowing through the area. The moon appeared Halloween orange glowing though the smoke.




I closed all the windows in the house as I didn’t want the smoke to get inside. However, the Santa Ana winds make the temperature incredibly warm so it wasn’t long until inside got stuffy. Turning on the fans did little to help.



Kevin made it to work the next morning but I was still at home with my cold\sinus infection. With Kevin’s asthma and my cold\sinus infection just trying to breathe normally was hard. At work, they let any non-essential personnel leave and work from home.

As bad as it is, I feel very fortunate. We aren’t in any immediate danger. As I told my mom last night, we may be 15 miles from the fire, but there’s a lot of concrete from there to here. The worst we have to deal with is cleaning the layer of soot that has covered the backyard.



It’s Wednesday now, and the Santiago fire is 30% contained. The winds have died down some so the smoke isn’t so bad. There’s white ash everywhere and it kind of looks like snow. A co-worker just said to me, “I’ve heard of a white Christmas before, but not a white Halloween!”

*Photos are from the OC Register

Biking to Huntington Beach

So I ran out of time this week to give you a proper entry due to a mid-week sickness (a cold, that I’m sure someone-at-work’s small child blessed us with) and now a rush to get ready for this upcoming weekend’s activity. This entry is going to be picture heavy in lieu of words (hi Shannen!). It’s all as well due to the fact that I’m once again cheating.

The thing is, I’ve ridden my bike from Costa Mesa to Huntington Beach once before. With Andrea and Hefe to be exact, 6 years ago, and I suffered the entire way due to a massive post-Harp hangover. I hadn’t made the ride again due to post-traumatic stress from biking against the wind with a post-Harp hangover. I’m not sure why I recently thought of doing the ride again, besides the fact that I got an awesome beach cruiser bike for my birthday (hi Kevin!) and I felt like biking somewhere else beside the peninsula. My breaking the new this weekend rules and justifying it is that:

• I’ve never done the ride with KEVIN before
  
• I’ve never done the ride with a beach cruiser before
  
• I’ve never done the ride WITHOUT a post-Harp hangover.

So there you go.


My awesome new beach cruiser




The ride from Costa Mesa to Huntington Beach is great. It follows Pacific Coast Highway on the ocean side, on a fairly flat bike path. It was a beautiful 75 degree day last Saturday and we made the 16 mile round trip without too much effort. We did have a pretty strong headwind going there, but it was so nice going back that we did 8 miles in a little over 15 minutes.


Starting Point


Ending Point


View from the bridge


Main Street, Huntington Beach


Huntington Beach Pier


Kevin wants you to now sing the theme song to Three's Company. "Come and knock on our door! We're waiting for you! Where kisses are something something needa-nodda-de-doo!"






I’ve got to get back to getting ready. I’m afraid to say that this upcoming weekend is a previously done thing before, so I’ll have to gather ideas on how to make it new-y.

Newport Dunes Marina Outdoor Movie - Newport Beach, CA

I’ve really had a brain fart recently finding new things to do. Not to say there aren’t things I’d be willing to do....there are plenty of festivals and fairs still going on; but I figured that would start to get old (plus I don’t want my love of corn dogs to go away). I was still perplexed on finding something when Saturday approached. In my pajamas and with my decaf coffee, I scoured the internet for anything that would be good. I had finally resigned myself to drive 3 hours for a sandwich (which, not to give too much away, will happen at some point) but decided to go get my nails done first (have to look pretty for sandwiches). Kevin, not wanting to drive 3 hours for a sandwich (yet!), offered to look for some ideas while I was gone.

By the time I got back Kevin (who rocks) and found a great idea that was a cheap, and even better still, it was practically in our own back yard. We decided we were going to go to the Newport Dunes Marina. They show outdoor movies on the beach every weekend.

Kevin’s idea was a great idea, but it was also an “on the\in the” activity, which really is the best kind. In Milwaukee during the summer months, they have Drunks in the Park Jazz in the Park every Thursday night in downtown’s Cathedral Square. I’m not a big fan of jazz, but being in the park is awesome, and I always have a good time. Most activities are best when they are “on the\in the”. Like having dinner on the lake, or watching fireworks on the roof, or checkers in the tree house. I suppose some “on the\in the” things wouldn’t be so great, like taking a crap in the jail, but most things are so I’m going to go for it.

The movie didn’t start until dusk, so Kevin and I went searching for a place that served dinner before 5. HA HA HA! Apparently there is no such thing as dinner before 5PM on a Saturday in Southern California. We ended up getting appetizers in the bar at Habana, and then got dinner to go at Memphis once they opened. I’m really only telling you this so I can post the pictures of Habana and Memphis at Kevin’s request. Here they are:

Memphis

Habana

We managed to get to the marina a good hour before the movie started. It was only $10 to get in (for parking) and a short walk to the other side of the lagoon to get to the movie area. There weren’t that many people there when we first arrived so we managed to get pretty good seats up front. We were a bit confused on what they were going to show the movie on so we were absolutely amazed when they started ‘blowing up the screen’.






I guess now is a good as time as any to tell you that they showed ‘the Goonies’. I actually saw ‘the Goonies’ in the theaters when I was eleven - two days in a row to be exact (hey! I was eleven!) - not to mention countless times on TV since then. Kevin, however, had never seen it before and I could tell by the look on his face that he was pretty skeptical of this Spielberg masterpiece. But he ended up really liking it. I kept on looking over to be sure.



Seeing a movie on the beach was really great. There really is nothing like watching a movie with your feet in the sand, cool breeze and the smell of a campfire near by, eating a semi-warm hamburger from a to-go box, drinking wine out of plastic party cups, sometimes getting distracted by the huge yellow moon over the water, and watching someone who has never seen ‘the Goonies’ really enjoy it.I definitely want to do this again.



Kevin will want me to mention that there was a wedding reception going on the other side of the lagoon. The little kids had glowing light-sabers which with the darkness were really visible from far away. They also had karaoke going on and two, probably already smashed, wedding guests doing the worst bubble-gum metal song ever. Two guys, back to back, screaming\singing “AAAAAAAAA! (inaudible lyrics here)”. They literally had a crowd of non-guests peering through the fence to take a look at the humor. At the end of the song, one of the guys brought the microphone back to the DJ and said matter-of-factly, “Now THAT’S how it’s done.”

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Almost completely forgot! Remember last time when I said that the bartender at Skosh Mohahan's had to dress in full makeup because he lost a bet with one of the waitresses (Broncos vs. Raiders!). Here's the evidence that he actually went through with it: