okay. so! these pics are of san diego's north county suburbs, where i grew up. honestly these pics aren't as pretty as the ones from the previous two posts, and probably only mean stuff to me. nevertheless!
i decided to head to my old haunts in penasquitos, where i spent my formative teenage years. san diego's north county freeways are beautiful: big belts of asphalt (...and construction, alas) across these immense landscapes.
the thing about socal is that it has no trees. it's all scrubland. and while we definitely have mountains, we also have a lot of mesas and canyons. so when you're soaring over a mesa, the sky seems absolutely huge. after a trip to socal, the bay area usually feels weirdly enclosed and claustrophobic to me for a while.
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| From San Diego |
eventually i got off the 15, went down the 56, got off in PQ and found my way to my old school. it was amazing how familiar these roads i learned to drive on still were. mt. carmel had undergone a serious facelift though:
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| From San Diego |
that is pretty much the exact streetcorner where my parents used to drop me off in the mornings. actually we'd drive in the opposite direction, so if the light was green my parents would swing a u-turn and drop me at the curb, but more often than not it wasn't so they'd just drop me across the street and let me wait for the crosswalk myself. i was eternally late, so usually i'd end up sprinting for school.
back then that entire lawn leading down to the school was an ocean of juniper bushes. there was a path through them, which sloped down and then up, creating a "bowl" at the bottom. one year it poured torrentially for a week on end and that bowl collected a huge amount of water. when i ran through that to get to class because i was late, i ended up soaked to my waist.
that was memorable >_<
when i went to school here, the whole school was kinda crappy looking and painted the weird peachy-pink color as the gym in the distance there:
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| From San Diego |
it was a good school and all. it was just... built in the 70s. but they totally renovated it. i mean, it's still not swanky, but it's a lot nicer than it was.
actually that main gate there is where the more side-ish gate used to be. most people entered through the gate to its left, which was closer to the street.
going through the gate, you see this:
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| From San Diego |
they moved everything around so much! the library had moved to where the student center used to be; the offices moved to where the library was ... it was really weird!
i was surprised to see it was still called the mount, though. oh, the dirty jokes we cracked about that one.
i was really sad to see this:
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| From San Diego |
...because back when i went to school here, this area contained a huge oak tree surrounded by these benches that were kinda set with their backs in this hill. it was awesome, and my friends and i used to have lunch there every day. memories! i can't believe they chopped our tree down to put in a goddamn MC logo and a patch of concrete :[[[[
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| From San Diego |
this is looking left from that same spot. that door in the shade there? that's where the teacher lounge was (is?), and where my super-hot french teacher would come sashaying out every day at the end of lunch to our great delight. what began as chipper teacher's-pet-ish "hi mademoiselle!"s in sophomore year turned into a whole chorus of horny adolescent male "HEEEY MAAAADEMOISELLE!"s by senior year.
it's pretty weird to think that she was like... 26-28 when i went to school there. we totally thought of her as an adult! nowadays i'm like pfft, 26, that's a baby.
this is the theater!
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| From San Diego |
it got hella nice too. that used to be this huge pinkishpeach ... clod of a building. my parents made me play violin as a kid, to my great dismay, but after one semester of it in high school i put my foot down and quit. i was always a much better pianist anyway!
leaving the school, i took a pic of the parking lot. i learned to drive here! also, that patch of lawn there? yeah. juniper drown-trap.
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| From San Diego |
from there i actually drove over to check on my parents' old house, but the tenants were home so i felt kinda weird snapping pics :[ in case you're interested, though, this is a pic from several years back that the parental units took:
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| From San Diego |
standard socal mcmansion. LOL.
anyway, after PQ! i went into the mountains. poway's east of PQ and it's usually considered a sort of suburb like PQ, but poway's actually a pretty big place, and much of it is rural. as i drove into the mountains, i could actually look back and see the ocean in the distance:
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| From San Diego |
(it's that hazy horizon bit.)
pretty soon, though, the scenery turned to this:
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| From San Diego |
once you're over the mountains, you're in this highland area that seriously looks like something out of ... i don't even know, wyoming.
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| From San Diego |
then if you go past THAT, you end up in just wild scrubland:
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| From San Diego |
that was getting pretty close to ramona and julian, which are tiny little towns up in the northeastern san diego mountains. i swung back from there, though, and headed west toward escondido. i ended up cutting pretty close to the san diego zoo's safari park -- or, as it used to be called, the wild animal park. it's pretty awesome -- just this huge patch of wildland that they groomed to look like the african savanna, and then turned a bunch of savanna animals loose in. you can actually go there and see HERDS OF WILDEBEEST IN THE DISTANCE.
tiny herds, but still!
i didn't go there though. it was getting dark by that point, and i snapped this gorgeous sunset pic up in the mountains:
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| From San Diego |
on my way through escondido i found this hilarious little church parking lot sign.
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| From San Diego |
in case you can't read it, it says: THOU SHALT NOT TRESPASS and then goes on to talk about not parking in their lot unless you were attending the service.
and thus ended my last full day in SD!
1 comments:
Aw, school of medium-sized!damon. Medium-sized!damon eternally late. LOL
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