Queen Califia's Magical Circle

As an alum of UCSD and a frequenter of Balboa Park, I am very familiar with the work of Niki de Saint Phalle. In fact, I have shared some of her other work here in the past. However, I was blown away by her final work, a gift to San Diego, Queen Califia's Magical Circle. Brad saw a featurette about this piece on the news and knew he wanted to take Elliott to see it. When my parents offered to watch Elliott the weekend after Thanksgiving*, we ended up making Queen Califia's Magical Garden our exchange point. It more than exceeded my expectations.

A couple things to note, it is free! (Yay!) and open until sundown every day except Monday. Unfortunately, the website linked above is not the greatest and you will do better checking out the website for the Kit Carson Park in Escondido directly for directions. You park and walk up to the circle which is nearly concealed behind metal fencing until you get close to the entrance. Elliott said "WHOAAA" and "WOW" when he saw the giant snakes through the fence. We were just like - you just wait kid!

I took a ton of photos and I think I will just let them tell the story of our visit. We ended up staying quite a bit longer than I expected and I think we were all VERY impressed with the sculptures.


















*This visit marked a first: Elliott was gone for two nights in a row! It made since, since my mom was going to be coming down again on Monday anyway, to just keep him the rest of Sunday and bring him with her on Monday. To have one entire day kid-free was almost unimaginable going into the weekend. Unfortunately, both Brad and I ended up sick :P But we did have a nice weekend and enjoyed our break with highlights being Brad reading a Sherlock Holmes novel and me starting a new knitting project. We are party animals, I tell ya!