Pendleton Cotton's
Christy has to be at work at 9:00 a.m., but we duck out of the house while the girls sleep to watch the Carlsbad Marathon roll down Carlsbad Boulevard. It's incredible to see just how many people participate -- and how slothful I feel after watching the teeming masses flow by.
Newly motivated, I herd Sydney and Hannah out the door at 9:30 for a bike ride through Camp Pendleton. We're going to ride about 8 miles, which is a little far for Hannah, so we leave her bike at home and hook up the trail-a-bike again. This suits her just fine.
We start from Las Pulgas and ride north to San Onofre State Beach. It's another gorgeous SoCal winter day with temps in the high 50s -- slightly brisk with only a T-shirt, but too warm for a sweatshirt. The ride is great. It's easy to neglect this area. Access isn't easy. But it's the best example of undeveloped SoCal coastline anywhere. The burned hills have sprouted a new veneer of green and we look out over the deserted coastline from one of the helicopter landing pads.
Later we head up to San Clemente State Beach, feed lots of quarters into the parking meter, and walk down to Cotton's point and the old Western White House. It's just a little over a mile to the point, and we take our time: writing in the sand with sticks, glissading down the sand berms, and having a long snack at the picnic tables of Cyprus Cove Beach.
The surf is very fun looking at Cotton's, the wind offshore, and we spread out a towel and lounge at the point, scanning the nearly empty beach. Finally, we head back at 12:15, wading barefoot through the knee-deep inshore trenches, lingering.
Another lunch at Senor Pedros, mild consternation at the Chargers followed by a short power nap on the family room floor -- before I know it, it's dusk.
Christy and I go see Charlie Wilson's War in the evening, which is pretty good -- especially since the Soviet/Afghan conflict was one of my areas of concentration when I was getting my political science degree. It's a pretty early night, though, and come 10 p.m., I'm beat.
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