It was fun to see E + P in San Diego this week, and Vdog loved lying in the sun in their yard and visiting the dogpark in Balboa Park. We ate lots of yummy food: a delicious tempeh shepard's pie from the Stone Brewery in Escondido and an utterly amazing slice of chocolate cake from Karen Krasne's in San Diego and a fantastic artichoke and olive pizza from Filippi's in Little Italy.

Our first night in CA we slept in the car; we didn't quite make it all the way and stopped about an hour and a half from E + P's place to sleep. We pulled off on an exit for the rest stop, but slept on the shoulder of the road (which was very wide) because we figured Vdog would bark throughout the night at the people coming and going at the rest stop. I actually slept really well in the car, except for that minor interruption when we were woken by the CA state troopers sometime in the middle of the night. They had to make sure we didn't have warrants out for arrest and that sort of stuff; then they let us go back to sleep.

On the way home from San Diego, it was really windy and our windshield got cracked from a hooligan rock. Waah. We stopped at a "Fucking Mitchell" rockhound site near Yuma, but didn't find the prolific blues and purples that his rock guide said we'd find. Typical. Actually, Snark did find three little, unimpressive blue and purple rocks, which may be the stuff we were supposed to find. But really, the time we spent searching negates the tiny rocks he found. Most certainly "prolific" is not the word that comes to mind for that site. We found some cool mica rocks interspersed with light blue that were really beautiful when Snark cut them back in Bisbee. Nonetheless, they weren't what we were looking/hoping for based on Mitchell's advice (hence, our fond name for him above).