Chockablock With Houses, SONGS And Giant Rocks

When you go looking for wineries, rocks are probably not the first thing you think of.  On the way to Temecula's wine country, we saw quite a lot.  We ventured south, then west, spending another hour on the Pacific Coast Highway, then the 5 and then headed west to Temecula.  As I mentioned, I have had to apologize for badmouthing the above-mentioned highway for failing to meet my expectations.   The portion I first encountered was way too crowded.  But when I started heading south at least we caught the occasional spectacular view that people have crammed in to see.

The overcrowding is still an issue   We ventured through the rest of Laguna Beach, learning that we had only seen less than half of it yesterday.  The hills and bluffs and cliffs are so full of houses it defies description.  A lot is said to cost $15MM, which reminds me--Kobe Bryant built himself a home nearby, for a reported $51MM (Think of the poor guy's house payment--my mortgage rate calculator would not even go up that high, but, by taking 40.8 times the monthly payment on a million dollar mortgage, i came up with a mortgage payment of $1,947,854.42.  It's a darn good thing that playing basketball pays what it does....but that's another story).  Where was I?  Oh, yeah, the hillsides are crammed with houses, even at extreme prices like these.  Leaving Laguna Beach, we came immediately upon Dana's Point, which is yet another collection of houses overlooking the Pacific (and the hairs on the top of each orher's heads, I'm sure).

After hopping over to the 5, we took in a few sights we hadn't expected--a huge tract of land, empty land--that turned out to be part of Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base.  If the Marines ever run short of dough, they might want to think about selling a few lots--they might be able to get a few million dollars a lot, and they appear to have acres and acres.  On second thought, military bases are pretty sensitive about their privacy, so...

Next, as we looked west at the Pacific Ocean, we could see a giant piece of overhead that Californians must be having to cover when paying their electric bill.  There sits the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS).  It's a giant nuclear power plant right on the shoreline in San Diego County that has been shut down due to the discovery of failure of newly replaced steam generating equipment in 2013.  Running a plant like that to generate electricity is expensive enough, it's hard to imagine how expensive it is to be trying to mothball it while generating no electricity.  That's a SONG nobody wants to hear.

Finally, we turned east and headed toward the wine country of Temecula, and some wide open spaces.  As we approached, we could see the mountains on either side of the highway.  The very impressive sight there was how the mountains rising on either side of the road were covered with huge rocks, for miles.  The rocks are giant-sized.  Three or four times as large as the van we were riding in.  It seems the hills around here are overflowing with either houses or rocks.  To me, the ones chockablock with rocks looked lots better, but that's just me.