Today, June 21, 2016 is our 52nd anniversary. We have celebrated this memory of a time when we were really, really young (our eldest grandson is older then we were when we gt married) in so many different ways and places. Today was weird, special. Given a whole lot of stuff I may get into below, my attention was not focused on care of the motorhome. A couple of weeks ago it crept into my mind that a year had passed since we have any service done on it. I decided that a trip to San Diego was worth considering, since there is a Freightliner Oasis Center there (Our chassis is Freightliner and Oasis is their brand for techs trained in servicing motorhomes not just big trucks- they keep things clean). There are few good places to stay close in and no free spots so I booked a place near La Jolla where we had stayed many years ago. Somehow as I was putting this together the fact of June 21 as an anniversary barely surfaced in my brain. Great, I booked the service for the 21st and the campsite for the 20th and 21st.

We spent our anniversary in the customer lounge of San Diego Freightliner. During this exciting day I attended a preplanned virtual (on my part anyhow) board meeting of CityNewspaper and conversed with assorted drivers and service people working at the counter. The service took from 9 AM until 4 PM plus paperwork leaving us to drive separately through SD rush hour to get back to the campsite.

Our great minds are closely linked after all these years and we mutually agreed that dinner out, again!, made perfect sense. I will report on Nine-Ten Restaurant and Bar in La Jolla later, maybe even later in this post.

Monday, last night, we arranged to meet Ron and Jing at there apartment across the street from the baseball stadium where the Padres play. We got to know Jing through my late mother who hired her give a massage several times a week. Jing morphed into a caregiver and ultimately into a friend and that is how we met Ron, her husband. We hadn’t seen them since Mom died and they moved out to San Diego after Jing retired as a Xerox executive and Ron retired from teaching at RIT. We had a delightful visit and then dinner at a Chinese/Japanese restaurant across the street from the apartment.

Later: Somehow we left earlier then necessary to make our reservation, I think I misread the clock or something. Carol is still in some pain when walking so that would not be a great option although that is much of what La Jolla is, given the parking is very difficult. Between a couple of fire trucks blocking traffic and just traffic in general we managed to arrive only 30 minutes early we elected to sit in the parlor of the hotel built in 1913 that houses the restaurant and had a delightful moment to relax with nothing hanging over our heads. We entered the restaurant a bit early and they had a table ready and seated us immediately. The wine list is extensive so we were saved on learning that the by the glass list was more limited. I had a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon and Carol had a Syrah, both California wines. With any luck we will remember the wineries too. Carol had a lovely vegetarian dish and I had roast Halibut. No pictures, they were food! excellent food, beautifully presented, the taste was divine. I would recommend this restaurant to anyone who isn’t worrying about how much it costs. Those kinds of worries would spoil the meal.

As for distractions, Carol has had a muscle/ligament/joint pain since the middle of our Hawaii excursion. It moved from one side to the other with the truck trip to Green Sand Beach. She is walking with a cane to take pressure off the hip area and we are waiting for the results of an MRI. I continue to have painful skin cracks on the heals which reduce my desire to walk. In general terms “bummer.” We are hoping to make full recoveries in time to begin trekking again the end of August.

Wednesday we will complete our stay in San Diego by replacing all six perfectly good looking five year old tires on the coach to be relatively more certain of an unremarkable driving experience as we cross the country in hot time this July.

For those who keep asking: Leave CA July 4, Arrive Essex Junction VT July 23 to 29, Arrive Rochester August 1, leave Rochester for safari August 24 returning September 20, leave Rochester for the winter sometime in October. That’s all we know for now.