Doing our best to stay outside

I feel the need to count this as my first real summer in California. We were here for most of last summer, but we squandered it on the house hunt. This time around, we're serious about taking advantage of what So-Cal has to offer. And so far, it has been very good indeed.

 This month I turned 30. Whew. My 20s were good to me: I was a little sad to see them go. But I'm excited to see what the next 10 years have to offer. I had this vision of going abroad and being out of the country when I officially began decade #4...didn't happen.  Instead, David and I went boat diving around Anacapa in Channel Islands National Park (for those of you keeping track of our 2012 NP count, I think that's 7).

In short, when I turned 30 I went overseas, and then I went underseas. :)

This place was so incredibly beautiful. The sun was out, the temp was perfect, and the ocean water was oh-so freezing. But you can't beat the views down there.

Our first stop was on a side of the island where the sea lions like to hang out. Lots of 'em. As soon as people started jumping off the boat, all the sea lions swarmed into the water to play with us. They aren't shy, either. They'd swim right up to us and imitate what we do. It was pretty much unforgettable.

We saw some more life on our other dives - purple sea urchins, black and blue polka-dotted starfish, ginormous lobsters - but the most memorable was that we saw some teeny little jellyfish, no bigger than the palm of my hand - first I've ever seen on a dive. They looked so delicate and harmless, just coasting along, light as a feather, in the surge.

Did I mention that our diving boat was also amazing? We were on the Spectre. Not only did they feed us amazingly well (breakfast burritos, tri tip with baked potatoes and salad for lunch, and brownie sundaes to finish off the day), but this boat has a HOT TUB on board. It was a perfect way to counter-balance our chilly dips into the Pacific.

In any case, it was wonderful.

We've spent a couple other weekends hiking around the area. One weekend we went to Charmlee Wilderness Park in Malibu. It was a nice escape from the city.

 

While we were there, we saw some people filming some kind of spoof on the Hunger Games - specifically, the part where the Games are just beginning and everyone runs to the center to claim some booty and create as many casualties as possible...only in this case, their weapons of choice were swimming noodles. Kind of fun to see. Which reminds me, has everyone seen THIS spoof trailer of Hunger Games?



Our other hike was to the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve. We had a very dry winter, which led to not-as-lush hiking as we had in mind. On normal years I'm told the entire reserve looks like this:

But for us things were looking more like this:

Ah well. It was a beautiful day and very peaceful - and we left just in time to avoid the tour bus crowds. AND I had the unexpected surprise of seeing Joshua trees close-up.  Love them.

:)