So there we were, showing our English visitors around Seaport Village down by San Diego bay, and my younger daughter and her boyfriend found a cool candle shop…

The candles were awesome… they had hard outer shells, with thinner parts where the light from the candle would shine through… You could hold them up to a little spotlight to see the effect.

There were lots of kinds of candles, but naturally, I focused… (ha, bonus camera joke)… on the skull ones, because I thought it would tie in nicely with all those Mexican ‘day of the dead’ folk art photos I took. Fortunately, I didn’t notice the sign… right behind the little spotlight… that said: ‘no cameras’ etc… until after I was done with my pictures… that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it…

And obviously, these are inspired by dia de los muertos.

And thank you, Mollie, for being my hand model for these pictures.

Now this is just a weird, ironic coincidence, but after we took a few family photos by a fountain, I noticed some big kites being flown on a spit of beach in the distance. I put on the zoom lens, and lo and behold…

Flying skeletons… how is that for tying together all these skull and skeleton pictures?

I might as well show you the photos that led to my noticing the kites. I had to crop them because most of my family has no interest in being on the blog… so you miss seeing two brothers, two nieces , a nephew, my wife, and my daughter… but you do get to see cousin Dot… and her daughter, cousin Lynne and her boyfriend, Malcolm. And yes, they are pinching the statue’s rear end… and yes, I did egg them on into doing so…

Since all this happened, the three travelers have driven up the coast of California and visited my mom in the Bay Area, and are, as we speak, flying to Seattle to visit more relatives.

And that wraps up day two of their three-day visit.