December 25, 2000: This is Christmas day and the first thing Juliette and Lucie did after waking up their parents is to look under the Christmas tree to see if the story of Santa is real. As a matter of fact, Juliette was brainstormed to this very idea for a few weeks and she knows exactly what Christmas is. Santa is coming on a sleight pulled by reindeers, with a special mention to the one with a red nose. While all the children are asleep, he is managing somehow to enter the house through the chimney, even if Dad made a nice fire. So Juliette was happy to see all the presents awaiting her under the Christmas tree and there were many. She is of course as interested in her gifts than in Lucie's forgetting that the latter are really Lucie's. The Playmobil farm was a big success quickly eclipsing the other toys on day one but the following days, Juliette found some fondness in Lucie's cloth house as well as in the Leappad and the magic board.
December 26, 2000: We drove down to Pismo beach in a four-hour trip. As usual, organization and readiness are not the main qualities in the family and we manage to leave late and be stucked in traffic near San Jose, so that we arrived at the hotel in the evening.
December 27, 2000: The morning was spent at the beach in the Pismo beach Park. We left in the afternoon after eating in a Viennese restaurant (which was good, just a pity that all the interesting stuff like Wienerschnitzel are available only in the dinner menu), to Escondido. We followed the 101 Highway and went through Los Angeles to have a chance to see Hollywood on the way. We only managed to be stucked there during the evening rush hours for one and a half-hour with kids complaining in the car. Don't event try to mention the name of L.A. to Isabelle anymore. It reminds her of a palm tree version of Houston. We finally arrived exhausted in Escondido in the evening.
December 28, 2000: The Wild Animal Park in Escondido is really worth seeing. It is one of the best zoo that we happened to visit in the United States. Juliette was of course very eager to see the elephants but she enjoyed seeing baby animals a lot such as cheetah cubs and little deer fawns. Lucie was mainly interested in tasting the grass of the lawn. This zoo breeds many interesting species including Okapis, Californian Condors and Bighorns.
December 29, 2000: At Legoland in Carlsbad, Juliette spent the morning playing with Elephant-shaped Duplos and Lucie was very busy putting Primos in and out of their box. The Miniland which reproduced with thousands of legos the cities of Washington DC, New York, San Francisco and New Orleans is a wonder. Juliette failed somehow to understand why people built all these nice little houses, cars and characters if we can not play with them. In the afternoon, we went to the beach in Carlsbad. Lucie found the taste of sand irresistible and tried several meal composition: sand on seaweed, sand on piece of wood, sand on rock, sand on shell. The water from the ocean is cold but this didn't stop Lucie from putting her feet in it so that we ended up returning at the hotel with a half wet and fully sand covered little girl.
December 30, 2000: We didn't have time to see San Diego as originally planned but for the last day of our trip, we visited the famous San Diego zoo and see its wonder of wonder, the baby Panda Hua Mei. Juliette expected much of an encounter with the baby Panda that Dad showed her on the internet a few weeks ago (http://www.sandiegozoo.com/special/pandas/pandacam/index.html has a live cam on the baby Panda). She was somewhat disappointed to see the cub sleeping. We then went to the children zoo where Juliette could pet some of these little goats and piglets and we then of course looked for the elephants. Meerkats and Lynxes were also among Juliette's favourites. San Diego zoo is interesting because you can see many unique species such as Koalas (there is even an albino one), Pandas, and other animals close to extinction but it was a big disappointment after the Wild Animal Park. Cages are small and though the zoo emphasizes quietness and ecology for the sake of their tenants, it promotes these stupid bus tours with their inevitable noise and air pollution from loudspeakers and gas.
December 31, 2000: For our way back home, we decided to avoid L.A. and we drove through the Mojave Desert. Typical plants in this area is the Joshua Tree (of the yucca family). This is really unique. We made the junction with the I-5 at Bakersfield and went straight home in 9 hours allowing an hour for lunch. On the way, we saw the greatest concentration we ever saw, of steak cows at the Harris feeding co (near Coalinga) and of windmills at the entrance to the San Joachim valley.