Rani at the Meditation Gardens in Encinitas, California
I arrived in San Diego, California around 1:48 pm on Monday March 18th. I found Rani's apartment with no difficulty since I was there before in 1999. I went inside to use the bathroom and then I walked around some. First I went out on the Ocean Beach Fishing Pier. That pier is only about 200 feet from Rani's apartment and goes way out over the ocean. There is a kewl little restaurant on it, so I had lunch there. Then I walked around town for a bit and came back to the Apartment and brought some of my stuff inside and took a shower and then took a nap. I arrived here on Rani's birthday. I did not plan it that way, just happened to be when I was arriving :)
Before Rani got back from work I went out for an evening stroll along the fishing pier. It was so kewl being out over the ocean at night looking up at the sliver of the moon and the stars. The weather was nice and warm and the view of the city lights was kewl.
Rani got home around 9:15 pm. She and I stayed up a little past midnight talking before finally going to bed. On Tuesday morning the cable guy came to install a cable modem and digital cable. In the afternoon Rani and I went out to lunch with Jennifer. Jennifer is one of Jack's daughters. She is a little less then a year younger then I. I did not remember seeing her before, but I knew as kids she and I played together at Ananda Ashram. She is a stand up comic and also does some stage magic. After that we ran some errands and went back to Rani's place.
That evening Jennifer and her boyfriend Matt came over for dinner. I showed them the pictures from the first part of my trip and ones from two trips I took to Portland Oregon in 2000 and 2001. After that we watched a TV series called 24. It was a pretty kewl show.
Jennifer and Matt in Rani's Apartment
Rani took Wednesday off from work. We went to the beach near where she worked. It was a beautiful sunny day and around 70 degrees. We walked along the beach some, and I went in about as far as my waist. There were tons of kewl looking stones along the sandy beach, so I wandered around looking for neat ones to keep. After hanging out at the beach for a while we went out to lunch at a Mexican restaurant. The food there was very good.
Rani at the Beach
After lunch Rani and I went to this neat spiritual place with gardens and little ponds filled with Coy. It was on a cliff overlooking the ocean. It was a very nice and relaxing place. We caught the end of a guided tour where they told us a little about the place and when Yogananda was there. Once we looked around there for a while we went down to the gift shop. They had lots of kewl stuff there and Rani got me a book (Autobiography of a Yogi).
Meditation Gardens with Coy Pond at the Self-Realization Fellowship
We drove back to Rani's apartment. We looked on Yahoo to see if any good movies were playing and what times they were. We decided to go see Ice Age that evening at 7:40. That left us with some time to go and check out the Ocean Beach Farmers Market. Rani's housemate had just gotten back home from work so he joined us. They had lots of neat food there and plenty of free samples that we all tried. When we got back from that Rani and I headed out to the movie. Both of us thought it was a great movie.
On Thursday Rani had to go to work, so I hung out around the house most of the day. Again it was a beautiful warm sunny day. I slept in, chatted some on the Internet. I walked around Ocean Beach some and walked out on the pier again where I had lunch. I took a nap in the afternoon. Then I walked around town some more and picked up the photos that ranged from a picture of me in the hot tub in Kissimmee, Florida, to Jessica and I at the top of Pine Mountain in Arizona. That evening we ordered out for Pizza and Rani, her housemate and I watched the movie Pearl Harbor. None of us had seen it before and we all enjoyed it.
On Friday I got ready to head out to visit my nephews Dan and Tory in Walnut Creek (Near San Francisco). Before I left I copied a bunch of MP3s (Music) over to Rani's computer from a couple CDs I had. Things were kind of busy that morning, with lots of calls from clients of Rani's. Around all that Rani fixed me eggs and toast for breakfast and made me a copy of some Sanskrit chants for Fire Ceremonies. I left there around 11:57 am to head to Walnut Creek. It was a long drive, and for the first 150 miles or so it was heavy traffic. There were a lot of places where you would be going 70 MPH one moment and then down to 20 MPH the next and stopped the next and then back up to 70 MPH before slowing down and stopping again. The whole drive took about 9 hours getting me to Walnut Creek around 8:50 pm.
If you want to see a live picture of Ocean Beach near the Ocean Beach Fishing Pier, go to www.oceanbeach.com
From there you can go to a link to get to a web camera that is located on the
top of a building right next to Rani's Apartment. You can control that camera
and look around the area and see the Ocean Beach Fishing Pier. Of course this
does work much better if you have high-speed Internet access, but can still
be viewed from a dial up.
