It was Mother’s Day yesterday.  I am not a mom who cringes when she thinks of Mother’s Day.  I do appreciate a little something-something from my children, but I don’t like going out and waiting for hours to have a meal out.  I would much rather my husband and kids take care of that for me.

Yesterday, we took an adventure which isn’t the one that I really would have chosen, but I ended up enjoying anyways.  I love going on drives and seeing what there is to see.  My parents would do that when I was young, and I still have fond memories of doing that.  My husband took me on an off road trip.  He promised that it wouldn’t be like Hwy 173 going to Lake Arrowhead.  I should have known that it would be just like that that.  Okay, not exactly just like it, but there were plenty of times that I got jostled around.  My neck still isn’t happy with me today.  But, once we got to a certain point, it wasn’t so bad and then it was enjoyable.

We saw a gopher snake, hawks, robins, squirrels, chipmunks.  We stopped to play by a stream along the Pacific Crest Trail.  I saw lupines, Indian paintbrush, penstmon, western wallflowers, desert mallow, and other flowers that I didn’t know the names of.  We came across stands of healthy green Joshua trees and pine trees.  We stopped in a couple of campgrounds to see what they had to offer and decided that we really would enjoy coming back to camp there with the kids.

We ended up in Fawnskin and let the kids get out and play in their park.  We stopped to get dinner at Vons, yes, a grocery store.  We grabbed some chicken, a bag of carrots, some friend potato wedges and drinks and off we went.

We drove down Hwy 38, because that is the way that I wanted to go.  We passed through Angelus Oaks, Barton Flats and along the Santa Ana river.  The woods in that area are pine, just as in the Big Bear area, but different somehow.  We drove through Redlands, hit the 210 to the 215 and back up the 15 to home.

Mother’s Day 2017 was a grand day out.