Go Even Further West, Young Man

The day after I arrived in Arizona we hit the road to drive to San Diego. My parents had bought tickets to see an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Natural History Museum. That drive is not exactly a short one! I looked it up on Mapquest and it said that it was 400 something miles and should take about 6 hours. When travelling with my parents it took a bit longer. As my mom said: "travelling with old people is really slow". I don't really consider them "old people", but there were more bathroom breaks, driving right at the speed limit, etc. Plus my dad's real weird about some stuff, like when we stop for gas he has to clean all of the windows with the squeegie, and calculate all kinds of permutations of gas mileage (like since the last fill up, on that particular trip, for the month(?)). It takes some getting used to. But since I was just along for the ride I couldn't complain. Except maybe about having to listen to Prairie Home Companion - drives me insane!

The exhibit was better than I was expecting. They had a lot of artifacts from the area where they found the scrolls, photographs, as well as a lot of information about the preservation of the scrolls which I found interesting after my preservation class this fall. The museum is in Balboa Park, which I love. We went to the cactus and rose gardens after the exhibit. I could have hung around there all day if I'd been allowed to!

Before some of you get jealous about how balmy it appears, it's actually long sleeve and jacket weather here. The highs have been in the upper 50s to around 60, but when you factor in the wind it feels colder than that.

This giant Christmas tree is at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego.

Check out this gigantic fig tree in Balboa Park. It's about 100 years old.

This rose kind of smelled like a lemon.

I love the way the bark looks on eucalyptus trees.

These wind turbines are huge.

I'm still fascinated by mountains. I guess because I live in a place that is almost completely flat.

Moonrise