Orange parks and red legs

Well this week didn't start so good friends. We both had pretty bad sunburnt patches from our day at Laguna beach, myself around the edges of my swimsuit and Mitchell on his very pale feet, so we've gone through almost an entire bottle of moisturiser between us this week in an effort to soothe the skin and make it less red.  

Frozen yoghurt is also soothing to the skin. Probably

Also soothing to the skin when you drop it on yourself :(

We did venture outside the next day though as Mitchell's bought a bike! He can now cycle to work which is nice as there's a pretty good cycle lane all the way between our apartment and the University. Well, he can once he gets a bike helmet. We tried to go to the bike shop after picking up the bike, but it was closed on Sundays, and we haven't gotten around to going back yet.

Monday was a day off for Mitchell as Juneteenth is now officially a public holiday in California, however they didn't annouce it until almost the day before, so the University decided to hold off for a couple of weeks and celebrate on 28th (instead of the 19th). To make the most of the day, we decided to visit California Citrus State Historic Park. The visitor centre is closed on Mondays, so we couldn't go inside where most of the information was, but they had some boards outside about how citrus had come to California and how the groves have grown since the Victorian era. What we did do, was walk all around the park and see the citrus trees. The whole place smelt like oranges! 

Wearing orange to blend in

Most of the fruits have gone now, but quite a few still had types of oranges growing on them and there were some other trees with fantastic flowers. The views from the top were also great, as far as you could see it was orange trees. There was a big open green area with a few shelters and trees, so it looks like a great place to come for a picnic. We hadn't brought one with us, but we will definitely be back with one soon! 

The view from the trail

My volunteering is going well, this week I went through the greenhouse and identified the new species of cycads they've recently aquired. Armed with indentification keys, I set off and by the end of the morning was pretty good at working out what genus they all belonged to. My biggest tip: if it's large and angry and cuts you, it's encephalartos. 

It's pretty crowded in there

Mitchell's been getting on well at work, he and others in the lab seem to have lunch together every day which is nice. Apparently this week they asked if we call Mexican food Spanish food back home 🙈

During the week we came to the conclusion that we weren't being invited to any 4th July parties (we've only met about 4 people so far) and would have to make our own plans for the long weekend. So on a spur of the moment idea, we decided to make the most of the extra day off and go camping! Now, we don't actually own any camping equipment other than a cooler gifted to us by the people we bought the car from, so this week has been a mad dash around the city to gather all of the equipment we'll need. I've been to four (four!!) different Targets and a Walmart trying to source all of the bits, but we finally have it all and are ready to go! We even found vegetarian hotdogs to cook over the fire. 

Friday night at Walmart

This has been a bit of shorter post than normal, but I'm sure we'll have so many things to update you on after we've been out to the wilderness! If you don't hear from us by Tuesday, assume we've been eaten by bears. 

Love you lots

Emily and Mitchell

💖💖💖

P.S. as so many of you have asked, here's the dinosaur sheets we mentioned in the previous post. There's a lot of them! But they are covered with our comforter during the day making it a little less full of dinosaurs.