HAERR TRIPPIN'

Friends, A Museum, Two Birthdays

Sunday and Monday were days of connecting with friends... A main purpose of our visits to Temecula.

After saying goodbye to Leslie, I met up with Suzanne and Nancy, two of my 39-year-old's 6th grade teachers. We were a trio of women whose conversation never stopped. What fun!

After lunch, Suzanne and I ventured to the Temecula Valley Museum for its current exhibition, Am I An American or Am I Not? which asks visitors to think about examples of unfair treatment from our country’s past and present in order to protect the American promises of life, liberty, and justice for all.

The exhibition’s title comes from Fred Korematsu, who famously challenged the mass imprisonment of over 125,000 Japanese Americans during WWII. When faced with criminal charges for not following the military orders to leave his home without due process, the U.S. born citizen remembered his Constitutional rights and asked, “Am I an American or am I not?"

Developed in partnership with the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, the exhibition draws on timeless themes to bridge past and present, highlights stories of connection, and encourages civic participation to stand up for equal rights. It features stories of loyalty and resistance, belonging and othering, and solidarity and resilience. It explores how fear, discrimination, and government actions led to the violation of Constitutional rights during the war and how this history relates to the experiences of other communities, including Native Americans and African Americans.

Importantly, the exhibition addresses stories of other historic and modern-day events that parallel aspects of the incarceration of Japanese Americans to encourage visitors to take action today and stand up for the rights of all Americans.

We were directed to walk in a specific direction with exhibition sections titled: Immigration and Citizenship: Who gets to be an American?; Othering: What does it mean to be an American?; Loyalty and Resistance: What do you stand for?; Resilience and Solidarity; and How do you respond to injustice? The Conclusion poses the question, "How will you make a difference?"

Fred Korematsu and Rosa Parks were two iconic ordinary citizens who sparked pivotal moments in American civil rights history. Both defied unjust, systemic discrimination and bravely took their fights to the highest levels of the U.S. legal system, ultimately reshaping the landscape of civil liberties in the United States.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the nation's highest civilian honor. During the ceremony, Clinton linked the two activists, stating, "In the long history of our country's constant search for justice, some names of ordinary citizens stand for millions of souls... Plessy, Brown, Parks... To that distinguished list, today we add the name of Fred Korematsu."

After the heavy history lesson, the mood was one of frivolity as we met David and Karen at Cougar Winery for Karen's birthday fête.

"The first fact about the celebration of birthdays

is that it is a good way of affirming defiantly,

and even flamboyantly,

that it is a good thing to be alive."

~Gilbert K. Chesterton

Monday, after a very crazy day of medical commitments (another reason we are in Temecula), we dined at Lynne and Scott's to celebrate her 80th birthday!

"Your birthday, as my own, to me is dear....

But yours gives most; for mine did only lend

Me to the world; yours gave to me a friend."

~Marcus Valerius Martialis

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Scenes from the Santa Rosa Plateau...

This special Reserve consists of 9,000 acres of land that has been set aside to protect unique ecosystems like Engelmann oak woodlands, riparian wetlands, coastal sage scrub, chaparral, bunchgrass prairie, vernal pools and more than 200 species of native birds and 49 endangered, threatened or rare animal and plant species, including mule deer, mountain lions, badgers, bobcats, western pond turtles, and white-tailed kites.

There are 40 miles of trails here. Due to poor orienteering, we ended up traversing 7 miles which wasn't our original plan but it gave us wonderful, needed time in nature.

Our destination for a picnic was here at Landmark NO. 1005 which reads, "SANTA ROSA RANCHO - Located on the Santa Rosa Plateau Preserve, the historical site of the Santa Rosa Rancho is a prime example of various historical phases of cattle ranching in Southern California. Archeological evidence gathered from the site indicates that various bands of Luiseño Indians established village and religious sites on the land. No other historic rancho site in Southern California retains so much of its original setting undisturbed."

Home to Native Americans for thousands of years, their way of life came to an end in the 1820s with the secularization of mission lands. The Santa Rosa Plateau became Rancho Santa Rosa in 1846, under a 47,000-acre Mexican land grant given to a rancher named Juan Moreno, who raised cattle and sheep. In 1855, Señor Moreno sold his ranch to his neighbor, Augustin Machado (owner of the Rancho La Laguna, today the Lake Elsinore area). The adobes that Moreno and Machado owned still stand as the oldest structures in Riverside County.

While I don't like manmade things left in nature, this hidden reminder was sort of sweet.

What an ideal way to pass a Saturday morning. Yahoo!

We spent three days just enjoying being together: neighborhood walks, movie night, long talks, and of course, Scrabble!

"A Scrabble board transforms

and gains meaning with each new letter.

Sometimes it’s not so good.

Grin turns to grind, right turns to fright,

and sorrow becomes sorrows.

Yet in the course of the game, end becomes friend,

rust becomes trust, and age becomes courage.

Only later do we appreciate the journey

that shaped the outcome."

-Robert B. Sowby

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Get Thee to the Sea!

Isak Dinesen wrote, "The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea." He was right so off we went to Oceanside for a day with the magical elixir.

It wasn't warm enough to frolic at the beach so we decided it would be a museum day! "The California Surf Museum serves as an international repository and resource center on the lifestyle sport of surfing by capturing, preserving, and chronicling its art, culture and heritage for the education and enjoyment of current and future generations."

I was eager to see the current exhibit, Surfriding: Hawaiian Royalty’s Gift to the World.

Ancient Hawaii developed the act of waveriding more than 600 years before European contact. When Captain Cook christened the Sandwich Islands in 1778, his ship’s physician Dr. William Anderson noted the act of waveriding in his ship’s log. He described it as what appeared to be a “supreme pleasure.”

It was not an understatement. Pacific Islanders had been catching swells in both Tahiti and Hawaii for centuries. They were led primarily by the island’s sovereigns and their families. Surfing and the Hawaiian nobility are mentioned in almost every story in Polynesian oral tradition. They include feats of daring, romantic interludes, and epic sagas.

A Princess, three Princes, a Duke and a Hawaiian Royal Minister’s grandson would be the stately stars who introduced standup surfriding to Europe, Australia and the United States. It began in 1885, when three Hawaiian Princes attending college at St. Matthews Hall military school in San Mateo, fashioned surfboards from redwood and took them out in the waves at Santa Cruz Bay, becoming the first official surfers in the Golden State. Their surfing foray into the west coast waters was an historic event in California history, covered nationwide in the newspapers and magazines of the time.

Shortly thereafter, in 1892 Princess Ka’iulani, heir to the Hawaiian Crown, was studying in Northamptonshire, England. Homesick and missing her surfing, she took trips to Brighton, on the south coast of County Sussex to ride the waves there. British beach-goers were astonished at her performances.

Great grandson of King Kalakaua’s minister, George Freeth, was one of the finest surfers of his era. Invited by real estate and train baron Henry Huntington, Freeth’s public demonstrations of surfing along Southern California’s coast beginning in 1907, marked the inception of organized wave riding on the mainland United States. The rest they say is history!

We marveled at the exhibit, Expanded Timeline of Surfboards. What an amazing collection of surfboards chronicling the history of surfing.

It wasn't just photos of these incredible artifacts, the actual boards were there for us to inspect up close. Wow.

I was especially intrigued by Alan "Pal Al" Nelson's travel board. He built this board in 2000, designing it as a way to cope with the expense and challenge of air travel (he had a home in Costa Rica and surfed the world).

The 'Mona Lisa' of the museum is the exhibit Courageous Inspiration: Bethany Hamilton. It is far and away the most popular exhibit and compelling story that the museum has had its 40-year history.

"The exhibit tells the story of Bethany losing her left arm to a Tiger shark while surfing in Kauai, how she survived that attack through the help of Alana Blanchard and her family, and the determination exhibited by Bethany to not only recover from the incident, but return to surfing a mere three weeks after the attack. But she didn’t just return to surfing – she returned to competitive surfing Her story and her positive outlook on life have caused her to be in demand as a motivational speaker. She has inspired countless people to overcome adversity and not give up on their dreams."

Lunch was al freezing at the Mission Pacific Hotel's The Cafe.

Heaters and lap blankets made dining outdoors perfect.

Museum Stop #2 was at the Seabird's Oceanside Museum of Art West for the current art show. Inspired by Diane Wilson’s novel The Seed Keeper, this exhibition explores the concept of seeds as both a material presence and a powerful metaphor—an archive of memory, resilience, and future. Presented in collaboration with the Oceanside Public Library as part of the community-wide program The Big Read, the exhibition extends the novel’s themes into a visual and spatial experience. In Indigenous worldviews, seeds carry more than sustenance; they hold stories, languages, ancestral knowledge, and responsibilities passed orally from generation to generation.

A brisk stroll introduced us to something either of us had seen in this Southern California beach- habitat restoration with beautiful wildflowers within its protective fencing.

This was my first time discovering the Oceanside Rock Garden. Based on the proclamation on this rock, "I was the first rock!", it has been here for almost six years. Wild.