San Onofre Again

We don't have much new to tell you about. We have been here for a week now and still have no marching orders. Several rangers have stopped by to chat but none of them have given us anything to do. The ranger who is in charge of volunteers was off work until yesterday, so maybe he will drop by soon.

In the meantime, we have just been doing our own thing. We pick up litter for a couple hours a day which is also good exercise. The park is only open for day use now so the amount of litter is really down. It's a nice, quiet place in terms of visitors now.

The first day we were here I worked on the electric vehicle we use for transportation in the park. It was not working and I discovered that the batteries were the reason. They were not just discharged. They were completely dead and even my battery conditioner would not bring them back to life. I called the maintenance man who maintains vehicles and he came to pick it up. He said he had new batteries for it but we have not seen or heard from him since so maybe he is having other issues with it.

Dianna took the train to visit her folks over the weekend. They seem to be doing well except that her Dad is going to have more surgery to remove another skin cancer from his back. We just learned that it will be done at the Dr.'s office on an outpatient basis so there is a lot of relief about that.

While Dianna was gone this weekend I decided to do some litter pickup. Since the electric vehicle was not available I rode the scooter down to the end of the park. I parked it where we always park the cart in an out of the way area at the front of the Official Vehicles Only spaces. When I returned I found a citation for parking in an unauthorized area! I thought all the rangers knew my scooter but there is a new "gung ho" ranger who only started a couple months ago. They call him "Mr Citation". He writes more citations than all the other rangers put together. That is what we want during the camping season, but certainly not what I want right now.

I went up to the kiosk and contacted him by radio, asking him to give me a call at the kiosk. I told him who I was and what had happened. I told him that if I had to pay $40 every time I picked up litter that the park was going to get very dirty this year! He was good about it and told me to leave the citation at the kiosk and that he would take care of it. I thought it was pretty funny.