What a weekend!

Friday night, A2 and I picked up Kathy and headed to Happy Hour and McCormick & Schmidt’s, for cheap burgers and drinks. The drinks were absolutely necessary – we’d all had a nutty week and needed to vent for various reasons, plus it helped to be slightly tipsy for what followed: Bride and Prejudice at the Laemmle. By the director of “Bend it Like Beckham,” “Bride and Prejudice” is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic done in full-on Bollywood style. That includes people spontaneously breaking into badly-dubbed song and modern-Indian dance – I loved it! The leads were terrific, the music was fun, and one of the cute guys from “Lost” had a large-ish role; definitely a good Girls’ Night movie.

Saturday am, A2 and I headed down to Anza Borrego State Park, northeast of San Diego, to check out the wildflower bloom. The day started out well: we had a pretty drive, and after a brief stop at the visitor’s center we were directed to check out acres of wildflowers blooming just north of Borrego Springs.

The high point of this area for me was a gigantic caterpillar flopping around in one of the bushes. This puppy was about six inches long, and nearly an inch wide:

Yum!

Our original plan was to do a hike near the visitor’s center in search of bighorn sheep, but the heat did us in by the time we’d walked from where we had to park (it was seriously crowded) to the trailhead, and we heard the sheep weren’t showing anyway. So we piled back in the car and headed south, since we’d read online that the southern half of the park was putting on quite a show.

Sadly, the show never materialized – unless it referred to all the yellow hillsides, which actually got a bit boring after a while. And then A2 started to get carsick, and we got a bit lost, so it was pretty much all downhill from there!

We compensated for our lousy afternoon by heading to the California Poppy Preserve the next day, since we knew they were pretty much in the middle of peak season. Here are some non-poppies, as seen from the poppy preserve:

The whole area was obscenely windy, so we didn’t get too many good shots in. Still, it was a beautiful area to walk around, full of birds and waving grass (and closed-up poppies hiding from the wind).

Windy poppies:

Despite the weekend’s disappointments, we walked away with some nice pictures and got to see lots of pretty flowers. Both parks were definitely worth checking out while they were in bloom!

My pics: http://gallery.laityphoto.com/v/anastasia/200503_wildflowers