President's Day Weekend

On President's Day weekend, we decided to take a bit of a break from everything and headed back up to the Mono Lake area. To our dismay, most of the snow has already disappeared. We drove around and explored some trails by the Inyo cinder cones.

Afterwards, we headed out to find a trail that is supposed to go around Mono Lake. We drove a lot. There were not very many good areas to camp. Most were exposed and very dusty. The consistency of the dirt was more like ash and it just got into everything. We thought that we would be driving through patches of snow, but all we got was dry dust. 

By the time the sun started to set, we did find a really great camping spot. I was busy getting dinner going. Christian set up camp and went to take pictures for us.

We had some shelter with the trees around us and yet, we had a view overlooking the lake with snowy mountains in the background. It was beautiful! I wish we could have stayed longer, but in the morning, we packed up and left fairly quickly to try to make it to Bodie before the crowds arrived. We wanted to show Caitlyn the ghost town, as she loves to take pictures of old mines, abandoned buildings and other artifacts from the past.

The sunrise on the way out was almost just as stunning as the sunset the evening before.

The route we planned to take was closed for some reason, so we had to backtrack some to get back on the major roads. We got there and saw that the park service has really taken control of the area. Christian and I came many years ago and you can freely come and go for the most part but they closed off the park during certain hours and charged a steep amount to come visit. They seemed to have a small army of park officials living in what I assume are the houses and cabins in the best conditions. And if you don't think they didn't update somewhat the interiors of those buildings, you better think again. So the excessive fees go towards, not only their salaries but the water, electricity and gas they get piped into the middle of nowhere so they can live comfortably out there.

But since they still were not open, we drove around some of the side trails a bit until they did.  It took us a long time to drive out there, we figured that we will probably never return, so we just waited for the park to open so that the kids can see it. 

We ended up spending quite a few hours there, walking around and taking pictures. Despite the fleet of park service trucks in the parking lot and several houses that were clearly occupied, we only saw one employee driving around and one walking around the actual town. The town of Bodie was fairly extensive at one point. There were lots of houses, a fancy hotel, school, church, gas station, mercantile, bank, saloon and even their own power plant. They did not let us into the main mining area or the main house. You had to pay extra for a tour of that area. 

We finally called it quits at some point as it was getting rather crowded with some unsavory loud tourists.

We headed out the backside of the town to see where the 4x4 trails would take us. We went through some interesting canyons. We took note of possible places to camp for the future. The walls of the canyons in a lot of spots seemed like it would make for good climbing. 

We made it out following some utility roads. It was pretty rough at times. There were a bunch of working mines in the area as well so certain parts were blocked off and we had to make our way around. 

We decided to head home that night so that we can wind down and get some proper rest on Monday before everyone has to put their noses back to the grindstone. Plus, the traffic was better because we returned early.

February

Emily had her last soccer games of the season/school year/high school career. She is rather sad about that. Her very last game was a home game against Lakeside.

They announced and said a few words about all the graduating seniors before the game. They usually allow the seniors a chance to play on the varsity team for their last game, but if the varsity team actually wins this last game, they will finally make it to CIF this year. The coach recruited a bunch of his "Legends" team players to come attend North and play on the school team to get to this place, so the girls knew that they would not get more than a token amount of play time. They decided that they would rather have fun and enjoy their last game with their own team. 

Except for a couple exceptions, the JV team all get along and are fairly good friends. They have a good camaraderie and work well as a team. The varsity team, even though they have skillful players, don't get along as well...unless they were already on the same Legends team to begin with. In fact, several of the players either quit or demoted themselves to the JV team because they were fed up with the coach, and/or some of the other players there. 

JV won their game and are once again league champions. Of course, they are in a fairly low league, so Emily says it isn't difficult to do. However, Varsity won their game as well, so they are finally league champions as well and will move on to CIF as they had hoped. Apparently the principal came down during their game and apparently didn't even realize that North had a girls soccer team. He's been there three years. Of course, he is leaving at the end of this school year to take a position up north. Since we have been in this area, we have had so many different principals in the three schools they've attended. There seems to be a revolving door for these positions. I don't think it is great for the schools or students, but then again, some of them have been really bad and you didn't mind seeing them leave for whatever reason.

Anyway, our varsity team made it to the third round of CIF games before losing, so they did fairly well.

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We went down to San Diego to visit with Christian's dad before his surgery. He seemed like he was doing fairly well, except for being easily tired. His surgery went well. I guess he technically had a triple by-pass surgery as they replaced three of his arteries with veins from other parts of his body. He was in different stages in the hospital for about a week or so and then was able to go home to rest there. The pain was getting to a more tolerable level and he seemed to be recovering well, but all of a sudden he ends up back in the hospital. He had arterial fibrillation and his lungs filled up again. 

They gave him a CT scan to find out exactly what was going on, but basically, they were not surprised as this is apparently a common occurrence after such an operation. Apparently the fix was to give him drugs to fix some of the side affects and then stop and restart his heart like some kind of weird reset button. It was very scary and stressful, but his heart started right back up. They monitored him for a bit and now he is back home again back in recovery mode. 

We had plans to go back and visit with him before all this happened but had to postpone it for various reasons. Now we had to let him recover a bit from this last ordeal before he would be up for visitors again.

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Meanwhile, while Christian was going back and forth from his classroom showing the kids a rather dangerous exhibition of climbing up the backside of one of the buildings, he was chatting with a student and had a terrible mis-step down the stairs and turned his ankle pretty badly. He was able to make it home but was out the next two days because it totally swelled up and he couldn't put any weight on it. By the third day, the swelling went down a little and was able to pull an old boot on to give his ankle some support and went back to work. Ironically, there was an old crutch that someone chucked up onto the roof of the building he was doing his physics demonstration on and he climbed all he way up to retrieve the crutch. He later had to use that crutch to get around!

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The girls went with the church youth group to the local climbing gym.

They usually only make it to about half the activities or less, either by choice or because of their school schedules. They don't always like the activities planned but they were pretty happy about this one. Emily especially took full advantage and climbed until she couldn't climb any more. She did pay for it for the next couple of days though as her arms were pretty sore afterwards.

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Emily went and took her written test for her driver's permit. It was a bit of a nightmare as she had to take this stupid online class for it and it was a lot longer than she had thought and had procrastinated too much. Anyway, she finally finished the course on a Friday evening, only to find out that she had to wait for them to send her a copy of the certificate in the mail. Well, her appointment was going to be the following Tuesday and we were pretty sure that it wasn't going to get here on time. 

Sure enough, it did not. We went to the DMV anyway to see how we can prove that she completed the mandatory course since it took her two months to get this appointment! Apparently, they had to input the certificate number into the system, so there was no way for us to do this. We left and returned the next week and had to go early, wait a couple of hours in a one line after another. In the end, she passed the test, they accepted all her paperwork, but she still doesn't have a valid permit as she needs to take her first two hours of behind the wheel training before the instructor can sign off on her permit to make it valid.

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Since our trip to San Diego was cancelled, we hopped into our vehicles and drove out to Joshua Tree. Christian had finally finished the lift on the Jeep and made it through the dozens of other problems that cropped up during this last month or so that it has been inoperable. He had to redo the brakes, replacing the back brake drums entirely. The battery died for some reason. We couldn't even jump start it. We had to get a charger to recondition the battery. Then even though the battery was working, the car sometimes wouldn't start because the neutral safety switch needed to be cleaned. Because of all these problems and having to work on these wires, Christian had to put in some new wire harnesses as well as they were not in good condition. The neutral safety switch would also make the ABS light come on and that freaked us out as well, but once all that was taken care of, the vehicle works and sounds better than it ever has.

Christian wanted to take it out for a test run and make sure that everything is in good working order. He realigned the vehicle and straightened out the steering wheel which has been a problem since we purchased it. We have driven it around the city a bit but had not really taken it out for a proper test run. We decided to take the vehicles through Berdoo Canyon near Joshua Tree.

On the way there, while driving on the freeway between 60 and 65 mph, it seemed to feel a bit rough and shaky. It was a bit stressful for me since I was driving it. I was wondering if there was a problem, but as we got farther along, it seemed to settle and run smooth. It performed great after that. If it had lockers and maybe stronger axles, it would be unstoppable...but we don't want to go there at this point. Well, in some ways Christian would like to but we can't afford it. This project has taken on a life of its own.

It was pretty crowded on the trail between the other vehicles and the mountain bikers who want to use the same trail. Except for a couple of annoying people, it went fairly well though until we got over the pass and headed into Joshua Tree. There was a truck that caught up to us and was tail-gating Emily and I in the big truck most of the way. Christian and Caitlyn were in the Jeep ahead of us. 

Neither of us were going very slowly so we were pretty pissed that he was being so rude. When we got to this one spot where the trail split for about 20 feet, we went up high and the stupid truck sped up and went low and cut us off like we were in some NASCAR race or something. Christian was still in front of us, so it isn't like he could get by still. Christian saw it all and stopped the Cherokee boxing him in. I was worried that there would be a bad confrontation. The guy pretended that nothing had happened and asked timidly if he could get by. Luckily, Christian just ignored his ass and came to see how we were doing. We told him to just let the jerk through so we wouldn't have to deal with him any more. 

Christian made his way slowly back to the Jeep and got it out of the way. The jerk thanked them as he passed and then sped away. I hope he knew how much danger he could have been in with his homicidal driving. And how stupid could you be acting like that in the middle of nowhere seeing as how the trail starts at a shooting range and works your way into the dessert where most 4x4 vehicles are carrying shovels for recovery but can bury your ass if they chose to do so.