Author: Amy Arnold

JON: Ok I can’t do this. After patting myself on the back just last week for not being sick for almost a year, here I am with a stuffy nose and sore throat. I pulled together some photos from the week, but Amy is going to step in and provide some commentary.

Amy take it away…

AMY: Alright, you are about to get the entirely-too-detailed description of our week 🙂 Whenever we land at a new location, I do a quick check of the local attractions and then we decide what field trips we would like to fit into our week. Last week I found the Exotic Feline Breeding Compound just 30 miles away. The girls were really excited about this stop. This Amur Leopard is one of their most important projects, as there are only 50 still living in the wild.

Emily and Natalie loved the Snow Leopard, they say he is “big and poofy”.

The next field trip was one of my picks, because it involved hiking. This is Vasquez Rocks, a local county park. These amazing sandstone formations are evidence of the fault lines that run through California.

It was a little windy to be climbing around on steep rocks, so we had to turn back a few times.

The geological layers were amazing.

We moved to Palm Springs on Thursday. Just west of there is this huge wind farm. Tours were available for only $30/person. We took the windshield tour.

We haven’t had much luck lately with campgrounds that allow open wood fires or if they do, they don’t sell firewood and we aren’t prepared. So, here are the girls getting their fix of roasted marshmallows.

Here is the RV Park in Palm Springs. It was the largest collection of expensive RV’s we have seen yet. Also, we were the only ones there under 55 years old. The weather was wonderful, sunny and 75.

On Saturday, we packed a picnic and headed for the Coachella Valley Preserve. It was a very cool palm tree oasis in the middle of desert.

The girls thought this was very cool. Maybe we could tow this instead?

We try to do a family hike on Sunday mornings and last Sunday we hiked up about 800 ft to this Palm Springs overlook.

Later that day, we found this photo of hikers in 1942 taken near where we had just been. It is amazing how this city has changed and expanded to take up the entire desert valley.

And a frozen yogurt treat for the weary hikers…

Here is the tourist-y side of Palm Springs.

The home improvement project of the week: to add two more batteries that will give us more amp hours and therefore a longer time to be without electrical hookups. Between the recent exhibits at the Hoover Dam and the girls wanting to know why they can’t always charge their iPods, the girls are getting good at understanding energy generation, storage and consumption.

When I checked the weather this morning there was a severe weather alert about wind, warning difficult driving conditions for high profile vehicles, like RV’s.  Sure enough, the weather forecast was right on today. It was hard driving and we were headed straight into it.

Then we hit the hills and the winds died down, but the roads became narrow and winding and then the fog rolled in, sigh.

We arrived safely at our current stop, in the mountains northeast of San Diego. It might take us a few days to want to leave our campsite after the drive today, but maybe we will find a nearby adventure.

This week we went to Morro Bay State Park. We saw all kinds of sea birds, like cormorants, pelicans, loons and my favorite grebes. There was a helpful volunteer at the park and helped us identify the birds. After that, we went to see the sea otters. They were so cute! We also saw sea lions.

We started our school year with a virtual Indiana charter school while we were still back in Indy.

However, the virtual school program didn’t work well for us, primarily due to the amount of time we were spending to get our prescribed lessons done. There was no efficiency to our learning, so we were often working until dinner, sometimes after dinner too. Also, it didn’t make sense to have the girls memorizing facts about the ancient Mayan empire when I knew we would be exploring the Olympic Peninsula in a matter of weeks. We quickly returned our 150 pounds of books and materials and set off on our own adventure of homeschooling.

Now that we have been back on the road for a few weeks, we are working on a good routine. We have math and language arts lessons in the mornings and then we head out in the afternoons for the closest National or State Park or museum that accepts our IN State Museum Pass. This is what the girls have to say, so far:

Carrie loves the field trips. One of her recent favorites was the Marine Life Center in Port Angeles, WA. We saw a Giant Pacific Octopus and watched her gracefully eat live crabs. It was amazing! The girls fed the anemones, eels, flounders and other fish. It was great to have the naturalist all to ourselves to answer questions. He was even able to help us solve the mystery of the “devilfish” we had just read about in “The Island of the Blue Dolphins”.

Emily likes reading together and playing math card games. We are trying to read books set in the areas where we are traveling. If you have any good suggestions, please pass them along! She is also our resident Jr. Ranger.

Natalie likes the hikes, knitting and journaling. All three girls journal about the things that we are doing.

The girls and I took a great side trip yesterday afternoon to Hug Point. We found sea caves that can be explored only during low tides.

According to the girls, the caves smelled bad but they were full of cool mussels and anemones.