Day 23 – February 2 – Carlsbad, CA – Day 18

This morning was down time.  John is reading a good book so I worked on puzzles and played games most of the morning. After lunch we decided to walk down to Ambrosia Lane where we could see a series of geo-caches were hidden on nearby trails.

It was a very nice day for a walk.  We took about 20 minutes to get to the first cache which we could not find.  We walked up the long hill of Ambrosia Lane and found the entrance to the Golf View Trail where there were two caches hidden.  Yea for us we found them both.  There was some pretty nice views of the golf course as well.

 At the end of Golf View Drive we crossed Ambrosia Lane to the other side and followed a hydro-line ‘trail’ to find two more caches.

 This was a clever cache container. In May of 2014 a brush fire started at the edge of the La Costa Golf Course and the Santa Ana wind quickly spread it to 100 acres.  Five homes, 18 apartments and a commercial building were destroyed.  North County, where Carlsbad is located, had four other brush fires start in the next few couple of days. The fire was called the Poinsettia Fire due to its proximity to Poinsettia Lane.  Along the trail we had walked our first week here to find geo-caches I said it looked like a fire had gone through recently; that was it. Property owners filed suit against the golf course for the damages claiming one of the staff or a golf club piece of equipment had started the fire.  No idea how that turned out.

 After we found the two caches along this section we backtracked a quarter mile or so and started down another power line trail to find three more.

 Even the hydro poles were charred bottom to top.

A varigated thistle. We started our walk beyond the far hillside.   You can see the path under the hydro pole in the distance.

  The next cache was hidden at the bottom of the hill -very cleverly inserted in a burned stump.  The last cache was also well hidden in the base of a bush enclosed in a silk spider plant.  When we got to the end of the power line we found the area fenced and gated.  John noticed that a section of fencing had been torn down so we climbed over and walked down the drive to Aviara Parkway and two miles back to the condo.

This bush seems to also have become a ground cover. When in full bloom it must look very pretty.Our walk took us outside the boundary of the Aviara section of Carlsbad.  They have lovely landscaping all over this city.

 The sun was setting as we made our way back to the condo. At the resort the Summits section where we live is lower on the hill than the Osprey Terrace.  The day after we checked in the stairway between the two was closed off for rebuilding.  They have torn out the worn and rotting wooden stairs and replaced them with cement ones.  Today they were just finishing up welding the hand rails.  We noticed this clever sign at the top of the closed stairway.

I’d say the owner takes pride in his work. And it is cleverly humorous as well.

Tomorrow we are planning to get up a bit earlier than normal and head into San Diego to go to the zoo.  I have always wanted to go to the San Diego Zoo.  It is world famous and it has pandas!  If you drive down on the number 15 freeway it takes 40 minutes.  I have examined the maps and found a route that misses all the major highways so we will take about an hour and a half to get there.  But we drive through the swanky Del Mar area and the Torrey Pines State Park so it should be a nice drive.  We are not in a hurry anyway.