This is the fourth entry in California Wrap Up, a series of blogs highlighting our travel through California in April and May of 2010.

Following our time in Simi Valley with New Heart Church, we headed south of Los Angeles and through the fun of LA traffic to one of the kids favorite overnight camping spots:  Oceanside, CA.  Specifically, they love Oceanside Harbor.  It is a parking lot with no RV hookups and the spaces are super tight together, but it excels in the areas that are critical to the kids:  playgrounds and wildlife!  They have a great little play area right on the sandy beach, its only about 100 yds to the waves, and there are almost always a few sealions swimming around in the harbor to watch.  We’ve been there about 4 or 5 times and every time there is a sea lion on the docks.

Just down the road from Oceanside is the city of Vista, CA.  One of the last times we were in Oceanside, our local friends mentioned a recovery ministry named Green Oak Ranch in Vista, so we decided this time to contact them.  They agreed to let us visit and just hang out as guest to see what they were doing, so we headed to Green Oak for 3 days before attending a weekend service at Vista Assembly, where we had visited during Easter of 2009. (Remember the Tim LaHaye assignment?)

Green Oak was amazing.  They have on site facilities for their resident recovery program including a full cafeteria, dorms, a chapel, and classrooms.  They also have a over 100 acres of land that they also use for a retreat center, inclusive of a nature center, animal reserve with Llamas, goats, ducks, emu, a couple horses, a pair of donkeys, a bobcat, a longhorn, and a few owls.  They have a full reptile center, a pool, and retreat cabins.  Its quite a place.  Most importantly, you can sense the presence of God in those who spend their days there.  It is a place where lives are transforming and hope is being found.  It is awesome, and we are blessed to have experienced it.