The Mountain Getaway

A couple of weeks ago I took the week off. I've got to use up some of my days off so I don't have a bunch to carry over or cash out at the end of the year!!!

Since there is a shortage of rental cars at places we might have wanted to fly to for vacations, I had been thinking of going up to the place we've had our anniversary weekend the last couple of years, right on the beach. It would be the first time the boy would have gone. However, when I called to see what kind of deal I could get, they told me a price around $450 a night!!!

Guess the time we normally go has been "off season". Scratch that, I'll come up with someplace else to visit. We decided to head up to the mountains for a few days instead.

As seen in the first picture, Running Springs is the town we were staying in. It was a very reasonable price, not a lot of amenities, but it was fine. They do have an indoor pool and hot tub that we jumped in for a while.

We drove out to the same forest service fire lookout tower that we'd gone to a few years back. It's a ways out to get to it, and this time we pulled off to the side of the road heading out there to take pictures of the impressive rock formations.

Speaking of driving out, it was the first long trip for Keanu-Kutcher, and it performed without a hitch. The driving dynamics aren't Saturn S-Series, it is close to 1 1/2 tons compared to just over a ton for the Saturns, and you can feel it. The Toyota 1.8 engine is, of course, different from the Saturn 1.9, which has more torque at lower RPMs hauling around less car. Climbing up the mountain, there are signs to turn off your A/C. We didn't, although I kept an eye on the temprature guage. Guess what, it didn't move!!! The transmission did a lot more gear changes, and the RPMs were in the higher range, but no undue dramatics anywhere, so I'm calling it a complete success!!!

The boy & I went on evening walks. The first one, we went across the road to a large turn out area, and followed a path that seemed to go down the side. It connected to a trail that went on a long while, then connected to a paved road and eventually connected another road, then came up and back the road we'd started on. I'm pretty sure we were on a private road for part of it.

The propieter of the place we stayed had told us the place across the road (towards "downtown") has the best breakfast in the area, so we went there the first morning. It was closed for construction. We went to another place.

For dinner one night, we went to a pizza place (Neo's Pizza, since we were in the Matrix, I guess we had to go there!!!) and they had some of the best pizza I've had since we'd gone to Chicago!!! Cheese garlic knots, which were excellent, too.

There was a candy store we stopped into and got some goodies, and a thrift store that we bought a couple of shirts from. The day we left, we were able to stop in for the best breakfast in Running Springs, and it lived up to the hype!!!

We pulled off in a very large turn-out on the way back from the fire tower, where someone had made up a very large eye design!!!

The last night we were there, the boy and I went on another night walk, and did some geocaching, since it turns out there were a ton of them up there!!! We found three, and took over a Pokemon gym.

It was a great little get away!!!