Dixie & Mark

Last weekend (January 25) we got our annual visit from Dixie and Mark and it was wonderful. As I have probably mentioned every January, Mark always attends a “World of Concrete” trade show in Las Vegas every January. To maintain his “Professional Engineer” status he requires a certain number of hours of professional improvement and this is how he does it. Because we are less than five hours from Vegas we usually get together just before or after his conference.

They arrived late on Thursday and I worked most of Friday but we enjoyed many hours of visiting. Dixie will be getting her knee replaced in January so she wasn’t up for too much walking so we were limited in what we could do. Friday night we decided to go out to eat and we enjoyed a nice quiet dinner at the Olive Garden. Saturday Dixie decided she was game to go check out the old mission here in San Diego. I was anxious to go as well since I’ve never been there after having lived here for 30 plus years. It was very interesting.

After seeing what there was to see at the Mission we checked out the Presidio which is actually where the mission was originally located. They quickly realized that they were too close to the soldiers and too far away from the natives so they moved down into mission valley.

We then checked out the Mormon Battalion monument that was recently placed on top of the hill. After that we had lunch at the Casa de Reyes in Old Town. The food is good and the atmosphere there is amazing.

Dixie & Mark were supposed to fly out Sunday afternoon but their flight was delayed by more than four hours which meant they would have missed their connection in Seattle. That meant that we got to enjoy another evening of visiting.

Saturday morning was a King tide which was probably the highest tide of the year and probably the highest tide for several years. Lisa and I wanted to check it out so we headed down to Torrey Pines to see what it was all about. It was amazing.

This is a picture of Torrey Pines beach where we usually go. That life guard station is usually a good hundred feet from the surf and the sidewalk is always dry. The sidewalk is covered with about three feet of fist sized rocks.

We stood on the bridge watching all of this when I saw a white rock that stood out from among all the other rocks. I headed down the sidewalk and did my best to avoid getting hit by the waves. When that surf crashed in the rocks banging on each other was loud and a bit terrifying. Moonstones were everywhere and in less than five minutes I gathered a couple dozen very large moon stones.

I’m going to buy some grit for my old rock polisher that I’ve never used and see what they end up looking like. They can be very beautiful.