Concert shell, Balboa Park
First, the sunny part. Yesterday we explored San Diego's lovely Balboa Park, with Elsa's sister. Balboa Park is the home of museums, gardens, walkways, lawns, and the zoo.
After an elegant and delicious luncheon at El Prado, in the park's center, we walked through the central park area, past jugglers and a man playing the violin. We stopped at the Museum of San Diego History, where we learned that this area was one of the first major movie-making locations.
Concert shell, Balboa Park
The reason is easy to see: Balboa Park is filled with the most ornate and lovely structures, originally constructed for an Exhibition in 1915. There are towers, colonnades, a lovely bell tower, covered walkways, and everything is embellished with elaborate decorations - tiles, stonework, sculptures. Balboa Park also contains several art museums, a couple of science and history museums, and some galleries.
With the brilliant blue sky, warm green grass, plentiful leafy trees, it's an ideal place to spend a Sunday afternoon.
Now, the cloud. Sometime during the course of last night, after four uneventful years, our truck was burgled. We came down this morning to find the truck's rear gates opened, and a quick peek showed us that about half of the contents is now gone. As is probably always the case, the stolen items range from the ridiculous (extra packages of paper tissues in a plastic egg crate) to the devastating (the hard drives onto which we had just finished archiving our personal computer files from many years.) We can hope that whoever gets the drive takes time to read and enjoy all the data.
Roof detail, Balboa Park
Our truck is pretty full of stuff, and we have seldom carried it all into the hotel. At least we always bring in the computers, and they are still with us. If we'd only spend all our time in places like Murdo, South Dakota, we'd probably never get robbed, but big cities are where there are sights to see and friends and family to meet. This could have happened to us many times in the last four years.
We filed a claim with insurance, which will cover most of our losses. And now we have more room in the back of the truck.
We're sorry we haven't sent too many trip reports; we find that it's visiting new places that stimulates our need to share our experiences. Our winter seasons seem to have a lot of family and personal affairs, health checkups, taxes and other busy work, which don't make the subject of interesting stories. We'll be starting east in mid February, and we'll tell you where we stop on the way.
The hotel sent up a box of cookies to cheer us up.