We are now in our fourth month in our new house! Every single weekend has been full of DIY projects, painting complete rooms, trips to home depot (like three times in one weekend sometimes…) and even trips to Ikea! Have you been to the new Ikea in Burbank? Supposedly it is the biggest in the U.S. Let’s just say I use to know the old Ikea and all of it’s shortcuts but I almost peed my pants trying to find a bathroom in this new one! It’s huge and vast but new and exciting all at the same time. What on earth does this have to do with poppies you ask?
I have be wanting to go to the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve ever since I had heard about it! I would like to say it was about ten years ago. It was a year where the fields were flooded with poppies, everywhere you looked just seas of color. I know this because EVERYONE talked about it! Before I could get myself down there the season had ended. This proceeded for the next ten years!!! The saddest thing is I only grew up about 45 minutes away from said reserve – and never went! Around the end of March / beginning of April, I started to see people posting themselves in fields of poppies. I told my husband I think this might be a good year to go and he agreed!
So we put all our home projects on pause for an afternoon of adventure! That is exactly what we did for two and a half hours. We roamed the hills, took lots of great pictures and just took a couple of hours for ourselves. It was a much needed break. It’s weird how just a little bit outside of Los Angeles can make you feel like you are so far away from the hustle and bustle of the jammed packed city. There are a couple of ways to get there. We took San Francisquito Canyon. I think there was maybe one coffee shop we passed driving through the canyon and that was it! Life slowed a bit, lots of houses with horses roaming close by. When we started to wonder how much a house out in Green Valley would cost we soon realized we were completely out of range, no service!
I have nothing to compare this season with any past seasons but it was really pretty! It had just rained the night before and it was pretty windy when we were out there! The poppies are super sensitive to the cold and most of them were closed but we got to see a few that were open.
Before we left the house I packed us a light lunch because I knew lunch options would be sparse. I am glad I did! After our longer than expected hike, we were starving! But because it was so windy we sat in the back of our car and ate it!
It’s nice to step out of your normal routine every now and then. This was just an afternoon, but it completely recharged me so that when I did get back home I was ready to get back to tackling some projects.
Better late than never…. right?
