First Impressions of California

Tidepools at Cabrillo National Monument, CA

First, I owe Mom Horner a big thank you for being willing to travel 2000 miles across the southern US with me. We had a fun time! For everyone out there who likes to drive fast, did you know that the speed limit in western Texas on I 10 is 80 mph? No kidding. Of course, in our new Honda, it didn’t even seem like we were doing much more than 65.

Our first night in Texas, we stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Grauke. We had never met them before, but Tim and I had met their son and daughter in law at our church in Pensacola. Mom Horner asked me if it bothered me to stay with people I had never met before. I explained the military bond. People connected to the military understand other people connected to the military. If you’re a Christian in the military, that bond becomes especially important.

Our second night was spent in Las Cruces, NM. We could see Mexico from the road, and I wasn’t too thrilled about having to drive by so close.

Our third day we got to drive through Arizona before hitting California. We drove by Saguaro National Park and saw a LOT of saguaro cactuses. We also saw a homeless man riding a bike down the highway with a cart attached and a dog peeking out of the cart. I wonder how he could afford to have the dog.

We passed through three border checks in all. The first two were to make sure that we were both US citizens. The third one was a special California check. They wanted to know if we had any fruits or produce with us and where they came from. I turned over a bag of oranges that didn’t have labels, and they explained to us that California had natural barriers that kept out foreign matter. According to Tim, it works both ways. It also protects the rest of the US from California.

Our first night in California I got to stay with Tim in the BOQ (Bachelor Officer Quarters). He had compared it to the Hilton – the Hanoi Hilton. It wasn’t that bad, though. Tim found a hotel for Mom Horner in town. I think she prayed a lot that night – when we drove up, the front of the hotel had scaffolding and plastic flapping around, and it was right next to a seedy looking haunt.

I got to see the Pacific Ocean for the first time on Sunday morning. It was cold. After church we got to eat lunch at Ruby’s, a restaurant that’s perched on the end of a pier. It was a really fun diner with an amazing view – we were surrounded by the ocean and could see the green hills and brown mountains in the distance. Looking over the dock, we could also see surfers. It was my first time to see real surfers, too, standing up on their board and riding the waves just like on TV.

Life on Base

Christmas at 3rd Tracks, Camp Del Mar

I got to learn my way around base by myself. My record for getting lost and turned around is six times in one day. By the end of that day I was feeling very sore and sorry for myself. When I tearfully told Tim, his first inclination (which he did not act on) was to have me to drive it again and then look at a map and see what I did wrong. But instead he bought us milkshakes.

You see, at Camp Pendleton the Marine Corps is very creative when naming streets, for instance, it uses letters of the alphabet, like A Street and B Street. After naming these two streets, they had to come up with some other names, like 11th Street. They really liked 11th Street, so they used it three times, for three different roads on base.

One thing that families do around Pendleton is hang banners for their husbands or fathers that are coming home from deployment. I passed one today with a picture of a baby girl that said,

                         Welcome home daddy.
                         If you thought Afghanistan was bad
                         wait til you see me!!!

Of course, some Marines enjoy being stationed out of the continental US, like the one I saw with a sticker on his truck that read, “Defend Hawaii.”

So, right now, Tim is defending the office at 3rd Tracks, Alpha Company. He doesn’t even get to make copies or fill the coffee machine. Pray for him if you think of it – he’s about to go nuts trying to find things to do.


On the beach at Del Mar - Our Backyard