Bird's eye view

 

This is a picture I took looking directly west from the top of Red Mountain to the Pacific Ocean. I took it several years ago with a crappy camera but it is useful for illustrative purposes.

We inlanders feel so distant from the beach but we are really not. It is just that we have the mountains of Camp Pendleton between us. I think that the real "crow flies" distance is about fourteen and a half miles to the beach in Oceanside. It is even less than that through the base, about nine I think.

Of course, by car it is farther. Nineteen miles on S13. You don't get a sense of how close it really is unless you have a high vantage in our town. Then you see how really close we are. Can't even get to the top of Red Mountain anymore, unfortunately. Used to have a key that would work...