Days 20, 21 & 22 – January 30, 31 and February 1 – Carlsbad, CA – Days 15, 16 & 17

Saturday, Jan 30, we spent the day visiting with our friends Bill & Lynn who we met on the World Cruise in 2009.  They live in Yorba Linda, a southeastern area of LA.  They kindly drove the one hour down to Carlsbad to have lunch with us.  I whipped up a wonderfully complicated and exotic chicken ceasar salad (well, actually John grilled the chicken, but who’s keeping tabs?) with garlic bread and chocolate ice cream and peanuts for dessert.  We were having such a good time no one noticed it was already five o’clock and they had to head home.  Right after they drove away I remembered I had wanted to take a photo and had forgotten.  Lynn, too, had specifically brought along her camera to get a pic of us and forgotten.  We have each promised to a get snap done in the next week or so and send it to each other.  So, if you want to see Bill and Lynn you will need to wait awhile.  It was wonderful to see them again.  Maybe they will come north some summer and we can show them some of our hometown sites.

Sunday we intended to go back to Christ Presbyterian Church for the 11 am service, but I hadn’t been sleeping well all week and Saturday night I slept through until 10:30 am Sunday.  It felt great to have a good sleep but with the church 20 minutes drive away and us not even up it wasn’t going to happen.  I was sorry to miss the minister’s sermon on his ‘word’ for 2016 and it would have been nice to chat again with some of the people we met last week.

Sunday was also a lousy weather day.  There were 60 mph winds predicted with rain – lots of rain, and snow in the high mountains. The wind blew steadily all day with a constant howl outside.  There was heavy rainfall all afternoon so the plants and ground will be happy.  Everything is very dry here, they really need rain.  It did not appear to be a deluge, at least not at our place, so hopefully the water will sink in and not just run off into floods such as they had earlier.

Monday was supposed to be a cloudy day but it was really quite a nice one.  Since the sun was shining when we finished breakfast, dishes, email, etc. we decided to drive south to Encinitas and see the San Diego Botanic Garden.  

Last night’s wind blew leaves and twigs all over. The maintenance staff at the resort will be very busy cleaning it all up over the next few days.

We spent most of the afternoon wandering the pathways of the botanical garden.  So what follows from here is pretty much a hundred or so photos of cacti, trees, flowers, and landscapes.  Skip to the end if you want.

 A ‘living’ roof and plants on the walls of the entrance ticket booth.    The garden covers 37 acres and has sections for international plants that are suitable for this climactic zone.  We had a really nice wander.

 Dragon Tree.  The sap is red and is used to dye violins.

Giant Timber Bamboo.  Bamboo comes in clumping-root or runner-root types.  Most of the varieties in the garden are clumping root. Runner roots can grow 30′ in a season so it is very hard to contain or get rid of if unwanted.  There are several thousand species of bamboo and some of them are hard to classify because they only bloom once every 10, 15, or 20 years – or as some do, 150 years.  Many species will die off after blooming.
 Honey Mandarin. Produces very flavorful and sweet fruit but also produces many seeds so is not popular commercially. There was also a Mamey Sapote tree. The sign under it said the taste was similar to pumpkin, sweet potato and marachino cherries with the texture of an avocado.  Why on earth would anyone want to eat something that tasted like that???

 

This Mariachi band was in the Mexican Garden

 This guy might look nice and fuzzy but notice the spines.  Ouch!

There was an avenue of these cork trees in this area and more throughout the garden.

You could buy this sculpture for $11,000+ if you wanted to put it in your garden.  Sculptures by different artists were placed in the various gardens with the title, artist, and price to purchase on a placard. The most expensive was $50,000 and was just a shaped block of metal.  I much preferred this Matador.                                                                                This is an Orange Clock Vine 

Rosalind Hibiscus – it was a huge flower We saw hanging air plants like these in Ecuador. As we were walking past a huge Agave plant a couple pointed out this tiny hummingbird that was flitting around.  I couldn’t get a really good picture of it; it wouldn’t stay still long enough that  my camera could lock on a focus.  As we were leaving the garden the couple called us over to their vehicle. They had a bird book and had looked it up.  It was a Rufus Hummingbird, which is the smallest of the hummingbird species. This is called a strawberry tree, obviously for the blossoms. Hummingbirds really like the nectar in them.

The Hamilton’s Children’s Garden contained a “Spell and Smell” Garden where they had a plant for every letter of the alphabet.

They also had an amazing tree house!  

This is the blossom of an Island Mallow. 

 Well, if you made it to the end:  Good for you.  I believe I mentioned in a prior blog that I like to photograph flowers. This is the proof.  We had a good afternoon anyway.