Yachats, Oregon

I can’t add pictures to this post because of a slow internet connection at the house where we’re staying, but I’ll post them when I can. The house is on stilts and only separated from the beach by a few bushes. I found this house on the tripadvisor website, and it’s a gem. (Really. I…

Insurance for rental cars

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can stop paying through the nose for rental-car insurance? Since I no longer own a car, I don’t have car insurance. Thus, I have to pay for car insurance every time I rent a car. In Oregon, insurance for rental cars (and presumably owned cars) is about…

More Balboa Park, Trolley Tour, San Juan Capistrano

Lotsa train rides this week; we’re on a first-name basis with the Coaster ticket checker. Monday we went back to Balboa Park to eat lunch at the beautiful restaurant near the art museum and then to visit the art museum. (Charlie’s favorite thing to do!) Tuesday we took a trolley (bus) driven by Brian O’Brien…

USS Midway & Los Angeles

On Monday, October 14, we again took the Coaster to San Diego to tour the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier from 1945-1992 that now serves as a museum in the harbor. The ship was built to accommodate 3,500 sailors but sometimes had as many as 4,500. The mattresses on the triple bunks – and many…

Balboa Park and La Jolla

On Monday, October 7, we took the Coaster train to San Diego again and walked to beautiful Balboa Park. We walked through the Japanese Friendship Garden and ate lunch at the Tea Pavilion there. Many of the gardens and museums at Balboa Park were designed for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition which, according to Wikipedia, “celebrated…

Our uber-exciting existence

Let’s see…I walked to the eye doctor in Carlsbad Thursday (a couple miles each way) for an eye exam, new contacts, and new glasses while the kids walked in the opposite direction to get some more fruit and eggs at the farmers market. Then I stopped at the organic grocery, ATM (In network! No fees!),…

Oceanside, California

After a whirlwind couple o’ days in Colorado Springs where we caught up on mail and appointments, we flew to San Diego Monday night and took the train to Oceanside Tuesday. We’re staying in a lovely condo that’s less than a block from the Pacific Ocean. HOWEVER, the train tracks are as close as the…

Chattanooga et al

We flew from DC to Chattanooga on September 13 and are flying back to Colorado in the morning (the 21st). We came here to visit homeschooling friends, Lance and Elyssa, from Colorado Springs who moved here with their five kids in 2012. They bought five acres of land to farm and, with their friend Dan…

Washington, part 2

Sorry I messed up the days on the previous post (now corrected). I have to start off with Colorado news. I read the top story and watched the video on cnn.com about the flooding in Boulder and Lyons – 6 inches of rain in less than a day, a 500-year flood. How awful. It seems…

Washington, DC

On Monday we took three trains to get from our Lower Manhattan apartment to the airport in Queens, flying out of JFK into Washington DC (Reagan). DC, at least the parts we’ve seen so far, is a very different city from Boston and New York. We’re staying in the basement of a house that’s near…