#389 Lake Skinner Park, Winchester, CA

We left Ginger's house at Murrieta and headed down the highway towards Lake Skinner. After exiting the interstate it was a fairly long wiggly secondary road. We finally got there and on the way, we noticed that it was near Temecula which is where there are a lot of vineyards.

We liked the site that they assigned us. If it were in the summer and really busy it would be way too crowded but since it was at such limited capacity we had a good bit of privacy. Instead of describing all kinds of cool things we had done maybe I would just say we could finally relax as we had a full hookup. It had been quite an experience going from Red Rocks then the trauma of Fallbrook to being homeless a little bit and then finally here. The way I looked at is we didn't have to do much, just grateful to be okay. Every other day we went on a nice hike around or near the lake. Lake Skinner had some really beautiful sunsets and there were all kinds of hiking ability opportunities. One afternoon when we were hiking we saw some pretty large paw prints.

I want to think they were possibly a mountain lion just because they were so big. I put down an object next to the paw print so I could show reference later with a tape measure. Anyway, that was pretty cool, yet a little unnerving. We didn't have any problems with coyotes chasing Bert there that was good. We got a kick out of the kid's play area that we walked by on one of our hikes. It was one of those water feature areas like a splash zone. One of them looked like a

big faucet which I thought was really cool.

We went into Temecula regularly and notice a cool tack shop.

In town, we found a cool hike called the duck pond. We did a rather large loop that ended at the duck pond. During our hike, we came to a hill that was sandy and really steep. There was no real grass to get traction for your feet so we kind of stayed to the right where there was a little grass. Honestly, it was pretty hard to get up that hill and we needed our walking sticks and did little steps not to fall backwards. It reminded me of a really steep hill at a cinder cone hike back in Hurricane Utah. We came on back around and down the hill and we got to the duck pond. They had some references to Daisen-Nakayama, Japan, sister city of Temecula CA.

The sculptures all around the pond were beautiful. It was also fun watching all the ducks swimming around. From Lake Skinner to Temecula is probably about a 20-minute drive way out of the country but we really did enjoy the area and would stay here again if we had a chance.

Skinner Reservoir, also known as Lake Skinner, is a reservoir in western Riverside County, California, located at the foot of Bachelor Mountain in the Auld Valley, approximately 10 miles northeast of Temecula. Wikipedia

Address: 37701 Warren Rd, Winchester, CA 92596