Travels - Local

Twice, as we came back from Palm Springs earlier this evening, the image of a cross smote my eyes.

We went for a hike near Ortega Highway. I got too enthusiastic and decided to avoid the long drive over paved roads and take a short cut by way of Silverado Canyon.

It's not much, just an undercut of a brief run that comes down from the neighborhood called "Top of the World".

We left the Welk Resort before nine. I pulled off Interstate 15 at Fallbrook so I could travel to Oceanside on State Route 76.

Escondido is a sad town of white houses near its central city.

The peace of the garden could have been Eden.

One of the wonders of the Catholic Church is that when you go to any large event -- be it Easter Vigil Mass in a metropolitan cathedral, a monastery festival, or a bingo game -- you inevitably witness a genuine diversity of people.

Road maps give me a way of stretching my arms beyond the front door, a set of wheels that travel faster than the eye.

Crickets clicked constantly wherever we went in the grassland. They went silent only if I stopped too near them or if that other sound -- the sound of the wheeled locusts who are death to the mice, the snakes, the lizards, and the gleaming oil black bombadier beetles who try to cross these roads.

So far I have two hikes that I have covered.

I honestly wonder: if Columbia had disintegrated over Southern California and if the debris had fallen among the rocks that surrounded the resort, would anyone at the Lawrence Welk Resort disturbed my peace to tell me about it?

blu is alive, though not too well.

Perhaps this year I will also develop a virtual altar where you may see the names of those family members and friends who have gone on before us.

Poor Blaz. He left just before things got good here.

It's odd to think that I was in Blaz and Boris's country in a time of war and that Blaz is now visiting me here in mine in a time of war.

Lynn and I rooted our tailbones and did not join in the singing which, as it passed from the first song to "God Bless America", began to resemble the "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" scene out of Cabaret.

I checked the roofs of oncoming cars to see if people had lashed personal belongings to them....Caltrans called the halt to weld in a new guardrail, not to evacuate Wrightwood.

The Mediterranean has been around for a long time. It has a split personality -- a coffee shop in the front and one of those darkly lit places in the back that I suppose are to remind you of the intimacy of the dungeons where the Spanish Inquisition conducted its researches.

I almost can't write on the road.