San Diego, California

I didn’t post Saturday night at the hotel because our free “high speed internet connection” was so slow that I lost patience with it. I’m writing this now from San Diego. I forgot to say in my post two days ago that we visited The Great Divide / Continental Divide on Friday. There isn’t much about it that is spectacular, only that when rain falls, it is the place on the continent where the rain to the west eventually ends up in the Pacific Ocean and the rain that falls to the east ends up in the Atlantic Ocean. Neat to see and it was a pretty view.

We DID go to the Grand Canyon yesterday (Saturday). The minute we pulled into our parking spot and prepared ourselves for a short walk, the rain came pouring down! What timing. We walked to a look-out to see the view. It was pretty impressive, even in the rain. The kids got cold, it was definitely jacket temps and they had on sleeveless clothes…so we went into a little gift shop/eatery and had a nosh. We stayed in the park about 2 hours in total…it rained on and off. The canyon was truly awesome in every meaning of the word…it is a sight that should not be missed. The minute we left the park, the rain stopped and it was beautiful again! Go figure.

Driving out of Grand Canyon, we started calling to find a hotel along Route 40. We were hoping to make it to Kingman, AZ…get there early, sleep, and get back on the road. Unfortunately, there were no hotels in Kingman with vacancies. Hmmm. We ended up backtracking a bit and heading down I-17 to Phoenix, AZ. There was nothing special about Phoenix except it was much hotter than up north. The heat was almost unbearable, to be exact. Why people live there, we couldn’t tell…maybe the winters are so nice that it makes up for the heat???

Today we were on the road and heading out of Phoenix around 8:30 am. We saw lots of desert, cacti, and sand. We even were close enough while driving along I-8 that we could see Mexico! We drove through border patrol but they didn’t stop us. No excitement there. There were lots of mountains once we started really getting into California. Everything here in San Diego is on a hill of some sort. I think I’ll be nervous the entire time I live here and I’ll bet my emergency brake will be worn out, too!

We got to our “new” house around 3:15 or so this afternoon (Pacific Time). We unloaded the U-Haul and Odyssey while the kids ran around screaming “Can we swim yet???” I called Liz to let her know we got here safely. William was pushing buttons on the dishwasher and I was trying to smack his hands and turn it off when I started smelling something hot. I thought it was the dishwasher but as I sniffed, it didn’t get stronger there. I checked back in the new playroom area because there is a defunct heater in the hall way…it wasn’t that. At the same time I’m telling Liz “Something smells like it is burning”, I hear Steven come in the kitchen door and say “What’s burning?” We are both panicking by this time and I say to Liz, “Have to go.” And hang up on her. Steven and I realized at the same time that one of the kids had turned on the stove (knobs are on the front and not on top like our last one) and the boxes on top were smoldering. OH SHIT!!!! He threw the boxes down and I started screaming “That one’s on fire” and some sparks or something landed on the top of my foot while we were trying to get the thing put out. Just what we need in our new home. Everyone was safe, my foot will heal (there are a few blisters but I’ll survive). This is actually our third flirtation with fire in a new home. Hopefully it’s our last. How could we have been so stupid?! It made us realize that this house doesn’t have any smoke detectors so we made a trip to Wal-Mart tonight to get some. How can a house in 2006 not have any smoke detectors??? We feel very lucky that we caught it when we did. I’m still a bit shaken about it but everything is off the stove now and tomorrow will find us trying to find items to kid proof the kitchen.

I was very happy to have INDIAN curry for dinner tonight. I can’t believe we have more than 1 Indian restaurant within a 3 mild radius of our house. It is cheaper here than it was in Tampa, too, so that is good already!

Well, it is late here and the kids have been waking up early so I’m going to close this for now. We have no internet connection yet. If you are reading this, it is because one of us has made a trip to Starbuck’s to get coffee and upload/check email. Hopefully it won’t be too terribly long before we have a connection at home. I think we will get hot water tomorrow…everything is gas out here so we have to wait for it to be turned on.