It’s Spring Break here in Southern California and the first thing that brings to my mind is: Oh no! We need to go somewhere on a trip that is NOT crowded. Ack! That’s always a challenge in the new instagram culture where people flock to pretty places in droves so thick it makes national parks not fun anymore. So off the beaten path we go!

That path took Bug and I to no other place than my parents little oasis in the sticks! Hemet is NOT a tourist destination unless maybe you are documenting the dollar stores of America or really into Walmart culture. but it does have the advantage of not being crowded and if you look hard enough there is beauty everywhere!

The desert is wild with flowers these days. The first bloom of little yellow goldfields has popped up and covers the ground around my parent’s community like a fuzzy carpet. Bug and I had so much fun dancing around in the flowers and taking photos.

My dad said, If you guys like this, then let me take you to Diamond Valley Lake and show you more wildflowers to which we said, Yes, Please!

I had never actually been to the manmade Diamond Valley Lake, but fun fact: I used to work on an egg ranch as a receptionist at the bottom of that lake before it was a lake! Yes, it used to be a huge valley, dotted with farms and grasslands and now it is full of drinking water that belongs to San Diego.

It quite scandalous how that happened actually and Hemetites are not all happy about it. When they first proposed this lake it was going to be a tourist destination for water skiing and fishing BUT that didn’t work out because human contact makes drinking water undrinkable. So the Hemetites voted it in thinking they were going to benefit from a booming travel destination only to find out you couldn’t swim in it and nobody was going to come visit a lake they can only take a boat to. I take that back, boating is fun BUT Hemet is HOT and floating around in a boat all day, on a lake you can’t swim in to cool off, is not that fun.

So it’s pretty much vacant most of the time. Not that I’m an expert on that. Maybe it’s swarming with people in the summer. I wouldn’t know. I just know that on a beautiful spring day it was deserted. Wonderfully deserted and perfect for taking a two mile hike on their designated “wild flower trail.”

Not a bad hike! My dad and Bug and I thoroughly enjoyed our little jaunt.

We took photos galore, looked up all the wildflowers in the little brochure they gave us and generally enjoyed the kick-off to our Spring Break.