Our Trip To California Part 2

Here is the continuation from where the last post about our California vacation left off. When we arrived at San Diego we stopped for lunch at a fresh fish place near the ocean. The weather was beautiful and we enjoyed the sights and sounds of that part of the city. As we drove to Ramona, which is where the H2H office is, it started to drizzle, to which Jim and Jodi (the founders of H2H) exclaimed "wow, it's pouring!" We laughed because sometimes we get inches of rain in one shower, but it was a pretty big deal there because it only rains once in a great while. The drive to Ramona was really beautiful, mountainous and very rocky. Some of the mountains were covered with boulders the size of houses, left there by passing glaciers back in the ice age.


We stayed with Jim & Jodi at their guest house which was very nice and comfortable. They really know how to treat guests! While we were there we spent lots of time talking about our plans for our missionary work, and we worked on some things like our prayer cards. We talked about our budget and our fund raising approach, and about lots of other things related to the ministry. It was really an energizing experience and it was great to start our planning.

We went to the ocean on Monday and saw this pelican just hanging out on the pier. We enjoyed walking along and seeing all the palm trees on the beach. Monday night Mark did a little off roading with JT (Jim & Jodi's son), and then some of the high-schoolers that helped at summer camp came over. We made pizzas and had brownies while we caught up and reminisced about our experience with the Romanian orphans.

We stopped in at the Realization Gardens, and we realized that we were in a beautiful place.

On Tuesday we went into San Diego again and visited the veterans war memorial. It overlooks the entire city and surrounding area.

We stopped by a tidal pool which was really cool. We touched live sea urchin and saw a flock of pelicans nesting.

Then we visited an aquarium near the ocean and saw all sorts of amazing aquatic life.

The beautiful and deadly Lionfish.

After visiting the aquarium we went to the beach to see the beautiful sunset. Then we went to Austin & Anna's (Jim & Jodi's daughter & son-in-law) house, and then went out for dinner. The next morning we flew out really early and spent basically the whole rest of the day traveling home. Thankfully we had a pretty good trip back.

This was such a great vacation. We got to see lots of friends and figure a lot out about our coming ministry in Romania. We want to express our thanks to all those who let us stay with them and showed us around, it was such a memorable time!