Emily and Mitchell in the USA

This weekend we did TWO hikes! But one was small and involved a lot of food and and the other was much longer.  On Saturday morning, we met with our friends at 10:30 to go on a hike in Sycamore Canyons, the park by our flat. We were walking over when one of them messaged us with a picture of us! They'd seen us from the road and pulled over to drive us the rest of the way.  It was really windy that day and before long my ears were hurting from it. But we hiked all over and even stopped for a snack (kindly supplied by Susan) in the shade of a big boulder. The previous times we've visited the ground has been all brown and dried out from the sun, but since the rain over Christmas, the area around here has exploded into green. For once it was green hills we looked out over and not just rock.  This was it in June 2021 This was this weekend! (spot the snow on the far mountain) Me and Susan sitting on a windy rock After we'd made the loop, we all headed to our favourite breakfast...

This weekend, we used our Christmas money to buy ourselves year passes to the Zoo! For not much more than a regular ticket, this means we have unlimited entrances to both the San Diego Zoo and the San Diego Safari Park as well as free parking and discounts off food in the parks.  These are two completely seperate parks (but funded by the same wildlife alliance) but they're about 30 minutes away from each other so it's best to do them on seperate days, especially as they're both so huge you really need an entire day for each.  We drove to the Zoo first. It's right next to Balboa Park (where all the San Diego Museums are), but we had to drive through this really residential area and past a school to get to the entrance which was weird. The park opened at 9am and we were there by about 9:30am. We picked a random path into the park and started walking. Other than some little birds, the first animal we saw was an orangutan! It was raining that morning, so some of the animals...

 Hello Friends! We're officially out of Christmas hibernation and back to finding fun things to do! We got our booster shot on Thursday and were worried we'd be feeling ill all weekend, but it wasn't too bad. I'd picked a lot of oranges from the botanic gardens that morning so we'd have lots of vitamin C and it was a lovely sunny day and warm weather again after all the rain we had over the Christmas period.  Apparently the leaves change colour in January here The volunteer car park is filled with free fruit right now! After getting our shot we went for some healthy smoothies to help us recover (in lieu of anywhere to get milkshakes in the area).  Mitchell waiting to be stabbed My flavour was called Popeye's Acai The next morning, I felt a little bad and stayed in bed listening to audio books all morning, but Mitchell actually got up and went to work! He did come home at lunchtime though, and then slept for three hours, so I guess we felt the same, just at diffe...

Hello! We took a break from blogging for Christmas (sorry Auntie!) but it's Mitchell here to fill you in on what you missed. To start off our winter events, the Grad student association invited us to their pizza and ugly Christmas sweater party. We insisted that 'Christmas jumper' definitely sounds better, but the only thing that achieved was us getting mocked mercilessly and the word 'jumper' being repeated in an assortment of awful English accents. The party also included a white elephant gift exchange, something neither of us had done before. It's similar to a secret Santa, but you pick a gift from a pile and once you open it your gift can still be stolen from you! You do then get to pick another gift though so don't worry no one ends up giftless. I got a fancy pack of playing cards and Emily had a board game, before it got stolen! So she stole a bunny shaped waffle maker which she was much happier with. Emily's bunny waffle As we'd mentioned in t...