Coyotes ate his dog, and they'll eat your baby: Oceanside, CA

The last leg of our pre-California road adventure was spectacularly crusty. Dust devils swarmed outside the car. The side of the highway was strewn with the remains of a million blown tires.

Heat. No trees. Well, a couple of trees:

Fine specimens. Also, note the official ditch recognition. Ditches in
Illinois could only dream of respect like this. 

Dodger tried to drown himself in his water bowl at a gas station.

When we arrived at the California border, there was no cheery welcome sign. Instead, we got to pass through a border patrol booth. Not receiving a nod from the heavily armed guard at your station meant questioning and inspection, but Rob and I were judged acceptable sketchy. 

Oceanside is a stone’s throw from Mexico, relatively speaking. An alternative route (that we avoided due to traffic concerns) would have taken us even closer and right through a “war zone” of “border agents” and “self-appointed militia.”

Also, lots of artillery.

We crept higher and higher up a neighborhood hillside and finally arrived in Oceanside. Rob has an aunt who owns and manages properties throughout the western half of the US. Most of these are in California, and most of them have tenants. Maintenance in a home you actually live in day-to-day can creep up on you, let alone maintenance on a home and surrounding property that you visit once in a blue moon.

That’s where Rob and I come in. We would work for a week or so at a time in one location, doing anything from curtain ironing to window scrubbing to tree removal to exterior wood replacement.

Crown moulding.

In Oceanside, there was landscaping galore. The sprinklers hadn’t worked for 6 months, so everything that hadn’t died in that time had proven itself worthy of true low-maintenance existence. The victims had to go, though.

TAME THE BEAST

Beast tamed. That fence also got painted green. 

The property backs up to open space: directly below the house, protected land is home to numerous birds, lizards, mice, and coyotes (listen closely at night and you can hear them put a grisly end to something small and furry. Hopefully it’s not something small and furry that you thought you owned).

Californians also seemed fairly convinced that coyotes would eat small children. I can't say a coyote has ever struck such fear in my soul.  

Rob weed-eats a fire break.

Down the hill and across the road is a modern cemetery. Directly to the left are ancient burial grounds (you can see them in the photo above). Two rocky fissures denote one space once used for ritual and another for the depositing bodies.

One night, Dodger, Rob and I went on a walk below the house. We reached a wooded forest opening, and Dodger sat down and refused to go farther. This was odd. We forced him on, only to discover piles and piles of broken tombstones (unclaimed or incorrectly labeled, we hoped). Then, we got lost. Then, hail started to pound on us. 

Dodger might have been on to something.

We took a couple days off to do some exploring, encountering as much gorgeous weather as we did torrential downpours.

THUNDER. LIGHTNING.
And numerous termite tents being lifted off buildings
and tossed around like Kleenex. 

Our bike ride to the beach. It might also be mentioned that Californians think a
husky pulling a bike is cruel and unusual. Offering wheat grass shakes on a menu is actually
what's cruel and unusual. 

Dodger hunts driftwood

Don't even think about bringing your dog beyond this point. 

Oceanside at night.

After some excellent Encinitas thrifting (because Californians are giving with their Northface gear and parachute pants), a frustrating search for coffee shops that the fool GPS kept lying about, and figuring out that California hates dogs and does not allow them to legally set foot anywhere on its privately owned soil, we headed home to relax.

At the end of the week, it was time to move on.

The yard looked much better.

The bathroom chandelier had been hung.

Rob and I had not met our maker via Africanized bees or black widows.

Next up, Malibu. It was rumored we would be MacGyver’s neighbors.