Day 17 - San Onofre State Beach - San Diego

We started our morning off with a trip back to Los Angeles. My computer that I had updated the day before in Hesperia was in absolute disarray. Every time I turned it on it would show a bunch of code and then continuously restart. I took it in to an Apple store and was able to get it all sorted out. The very sad part about this was that I lost everything on my computer. Thankfully I had had the foresight to purchase an external hard drive prior to my trip and have everything up to when I left saved on that drive. I did lose a few photos that I love that I didn't post online as well as all the high quality original copies of the pictures. I am thankful to have all the ones on this blog that I would not have otherwise. Other than those losses, it is kind of nice to have a clean slate on my computer and I was very impressed with the support at Apple, they were so helpful and efficient. My phone had started acting up a couple days before, so I had them look at it as well, it started working again temporarily and I was very glad that both my devices, which had never had any problems before, decided to have issues at the same time.

We then returned to San Onofre State Beach and walked down to the beach to enjoy it in the light of day. I did consider heading back at several points on the walk as the heat was so strong, but wading in the water with the cool ocean breeze on us was wonderful. We then headed on to San Diego, stopping at Del Mar Dog Beach (aka North Beach). It is right across from the Del Mar racetrack (which looks quite beautiful) and is an absolutely wonderful beach. I paid for 45 minutes of parking, but ended up returning twice to put an hour more in each time. Dogs of all breeds (Otterhounds, Deerhounds, Whippets, mutts, everything!) were everywhere on this beach running around in absolute euphoria and Luna, who I have been working with for a long time for her fear of new dogs loved it! She was a slightly noisy of course, but not excessively; she's a chatty pup and if she's in a state of heightened anxiety she'll announce her presence to all that will listen. We had an amazing time walking up and down the beach and playing in the waves. We did get surprised once by a huge rush of water coming and forcing Luna to swim back to shore, she was not impressed and stayed out of the water for a bit after that. After going back for the third time after an hour and 45 minutes I grabbed my camera to take some photos as the sun began to set. I ended up chatting with a couple women and Luna had a blast playing with the one lady's Rottweiler, she was doing zoomies up and down the beach and through the water with him chasing her. The woman told me to look up her brother, John Moore, if I am in Colorado, apparently he is a very good multi discipline horse trainer that trains in Europe as well. It was nice to chat with such genuine people and I would have stayed for longer but my parking time ran out and it was time to go find a campsite, so we shook hands and parted. Finding a campsite turned out to be quite a task. My phone decided to desert me with no data, so I visited a couple McDonald's parking lots to use their internet to find a campsite and figure out where I was going. I finally found Campland on the Bay, which turned out to be much fancier than I expected and cost $60 for a night! Crazy! My motels have mostly been much cheaper than that. They even almost turned me away as they 'Don't generally allow people to sleep in their cars", they let me stay here as I have curtains, weird. The plus side is that I do have wifi and I am pretty sure the showers are 'free', yay!

Right before the big wave came in and flooded the area.

A few seconds later.

How could you betray me like this?

So much playtime!

So happy to see Luna initiating play with strange dogs!

A highly cropped photo to highlight Luna's expression.

Best pals in minutes! The Beagle mix up front was owned by the other woman's dog who's brother is a horse trainer. This dog took the job of supervisor very seriously, barking at any other dog that came nearby to tell them this was her pack.