Inspiring travel stories, tips, and guides from a couple exploring the world one destination at a time.
Every so often my family comes out from Colorado to visit and to see my father Jim, who lives in an assisted living facility in Escondido. Jim’s wife Hazel passed a number of years ago, but he has been doing very well. They had six children — getting four of us together is more than we could hope for.
Living at The Crosby means sharing the neighborhood with a lot more than golfers. Our home sits on the edge of San Diego County preserve land that stretches back hundreds of acres toward Lake Hodges — and the wildlife doesn’t pay much attention to property lines. Some of it is spectacular. Some of it requires snake fencing.
This summer has been a good one for butterflies, flowers, and birds. Possibly because there were significant winter storms and now everything has responded.
Last Updated: May 2026
We still had a property in San Diego that we had rented the past couple of years. Our tenants moved out, giving us a great opportunity to make renovations and put it on the market. We changed our travel plans and based ourselves in Escondido — the closest RV park to the house in Rancho Santa Fe. Southern California is an amazing place and it was wonderful to be back after a two-year hiatus. Great year-round weather without mosquitoes, black flies, tornadoes, hail, or hurricanes — just fires and earthquakes. It’s easy to see why so many people live here and pay the insane cost of living.
Last Updated: May 2026
Twenty-five years. Seven homes spread across San Diego County — downtown, the beach, a golf course community, and finally rural Rancho Santa Fe, where we grew Zinfandel grapes and made wine in the backyard for a decade. We loved all of it. And in January 2017, we sold or gave away almost everything we owned, staged the house, and drove east toward Florida to start a life we’d been thinking about for years. This is where the blog really begins.
