Mexico Photos

I have retrieved the camera I left behind in San Diego last week and here, as promised, are some photos to give you a bird's eye view of our two weeks in the Southwest. (click to enlarge)

Rancho Ojai, the campground at Tecate, Mexico, where we stayed from Jan. 13-23.

Our log cabin home for ten days.

Here is the inside of our cabin. The bathroom is through the doorway behind the bed. We used the bunk bed on the opposite wall as shelf space.

Here are the cooks in the kitchen where we cooked for sixty every day. It was kind of tight quarters for six cooks.

A patio outside the kitchen served as a multi-purpose room which sometimes included cooking. We also had another large refrigerator on the patio. (It says Coca Cola on the outside but had only large shelves inside.)

Leroy really did help with the cooking. He fried hamburgers (above) and made pancakes for breakfast (below) and other things.

 

When the food was ready we loaded it in a van and drove from the kitchen to the dining hall where we set up and served cafeteria style. Then we loaded the leftovers back in the van and went back to the kitchen to clean up. It wasn't the most convenient system but everyone got enough to eat. This is the dining hall.

The cooks also did laundry for the young people. We washed towels every day and all the clothes on Tuesday and Thursday. We had 22 loads on Tuesday and 18 on Thursday. We hung 46 pairs of jeans over the fence to dry. Leroy helped on Thursday. Here he is bringing a stack of folded jeans in from the fence.

Near our cabin was a nice southwest garden.Looks are deceiving. I only took pictures on the sunny days and there was frost on these cactus more than one morning. We wore sweaters and/or jackets almost all the time.

This is the group we fed three times a day for more than a week.

 On Sunday we also served everyone from the Shining Light Children's Home which brought the number to 135. This is the serving line that day.

A few side trips included going to the mountains the first Sunday. It was a winding road between mountains of nothing but rocks.

 Another day we visited an old folks home where some of the young people worked. It was very depressing to see 120 old and mentally handicapped people living in these conditions. The fact that it was cold and raining did not improve matters.

One day when Leroy was helping do laundry he got sidetracked in the miniature golf course taking pictures of old farm equipment setting in there.

We ended our trip with a day of sightseeing in San Diego on Jan. 24. Old Town appealed to the historian in me and Leroy enjoyed it too. We could have spent a lot more time there but we wanted to get to Imperial Beach in time to watch the sunset. It was a lovely day and perfect ending to the trip.