Our New Home in Tehachapi, California

After our day of snow skiing, we spent one more night in our camping spot in Apple Valley. Then we headed a couple hours down the road to the town of Tehachapi. We had to get pronunciation lessons for our new home town--Teh-HATCH-a-pea. Learning to spell it and pronounce it took the first couple days!

We knew that this was going to be a special campground, so Mark pulled the motor home in backwards. That meant we had to stretch electric and water connections under the motor home. But it allowed us to have our windshield pointing the opposite direction than usual.

Instead of pointing towards the other RVs in the park, we could now see the Tehachapi Mountains across a grassy meadow.

That grassy meadow is home to a busy colony of California ground squirrels.

Instead of a bushy tail like their high-rise-tree-loving cousin squirrels, these guys have a narrow tail that takes up less space in their underground burrows.

Also hidden in that green valley is a thin strip of concrete. That concrete is a landing strip, because our next-door neighbor is the Mountain Valley Airport. In fact, we were still setting up the motor home when we saw our first take-off of the tow plane pulling a sailplane into the sky.

Denisa hurried over to the airport to get the scoop. This is Skylark North--a full-service glider flight school. She got her information directly from the pilot of the tow plane--a retired Air Force pilot glad to have the opportunity to be in the air on a daily basis. Besides, his wife was tired of him hanging out at home too much when he retired. (Mark is glad his wife doesn't share this same point of view.) Behind the airport is another of the windmill forests that we are getting used to seeing throughout California.

It doesn't take long to get both planes into the air, with the sail plane tethered to the tow plane.

We watched as the two planes cleared the campground trees, still tethered in the blue sky. Our pilot friend told us that his plane is a retired crop duster. This little plane has enough power to propel both across the sky to altitudes up to 4,000 feet.

When the tether is released, the sailplane can spend hours in the air, catching air current lifts off the mountains. But many of the flights were quite short, so we got to see lots of these motor-less landings.

After landing, the sail plane tilts to one side, ready to be straightened for another take-off. Most of the flyers we watched were pilots from the nearby Edwards Air Force Base. Glider training is part of the mandatory curriculum for both pilots and astronauts. We were told that Neil Armstrong did his glider training right here in Tehachapi.

The wind determines the direction for take-off, and we saw them going both ways during the days we were hanging out at the campground. It was so much fun!

On the other side of the campground, we have a great view of an apple orchard. We're hoping to see some blossoms by the time we leave here.

In the meantime, some of the trees in the campground are already blooming.

Denisa loves flowers, and little pink fruit blossoms and the red leaves that accompany them are beautiful.

The mountains that we see through our windshield are the Tehachapi Range, and we found there are trails that start at a county park just a few miles from our campground.

We took off on a trail that immediately started climbing at a steep angle toward the summit.

There was a disturbing absence of signage, and we wondered if we had wandered off the main trail. As we got higher on the mountain, the trail got fainter. Using our best survival skills, we used the bright orange peel from our cuties to mark our path. It's not reassuring to realize that we can't see the orange peel on the ground in the picture below.

We were high enough in elevation to find big patches of snow, and we were obviously the first persons to hike this trail this winter. The good news is that our foot steps were as good as orange peels to help mark our return trip.

Mark, however, used some of that snow to make a snowball. The expert photographer that was also on this hike managed to catch that snow ball in mid-air as it zoomed toward the camera (and camera-woman).

We made it to the summit of our peak, not sure if it was Tehachapi Peak that we were aiming for or not. But there were nice views of other snow-covered mountains all around us on this warm day.

We toyed with the idea of continuing on to see where else this hike would take us. But the snow got heavier and completely covered the trail.

It was interesting to see that this snow was littered with an entire winter of pine needles and forest seeds. It looks like those seeds have an automatic source of moisture this spring when the snow melts around them.

Those seeds have fallen a long ways from these tall trees that are making Denisa feel very short.

From big trees fall big pine cones. (From big pine cones comes big pine sap. It will take two days to wear that sticky sap off of Denisa's hands after this close encounter with this giant cone.)

So we decided that our best chance of surviving this hike was to return back down the mountain in the direction we came up. We stopped for a picnic break to enjoy our summit and the beautiful weather we had been blessed with. Then we followed our orange peel path back down to our waiting car.

So we are feeling very good about our stay in our new home town of Tehachapi, California. We are also loving the view from our full-size windshield. We have found that sitting in the driver's seat gives a comfortable front row seat to the sunsets beside the Tehachapi Mountains. We're going to like it here!