2/21/08 (Thursday): As promised, here's the second half of our trip to Monterey. It sure is nice to be getting comments again!

Hudson and Austin have grown up so much. They're great kids, and I had a wonderful time visiting with them. Austin spent the night with us in the RV. Hudson wasn't feeling real well, so he stayed with Mom and Dad in the motel.

Fortunately, he felt better the next day. We went fishing and crabbing, but didn't catch anything. Then we went to the Santa Cruz pier and boardwalk and rode a bunch of the rides and checked out the shops. That was fun!

Then we hit the beach at Monterey. I'd been there before and was looking forward to exploring the tide pools, but it was high tide, so there were no tide pools. We had a great time playing on the beach. Mark and Hudson went for a long bike ride while Austin and Wiley explored the beach and Heather and I visited. We also had a long walk on the trail along the cliffs. Breathtaking!





These three sea lions climbed up on the rocks just before we left. The whole coast of California just abounds with life!











Monterey is just such a gorgeous area--high rock cliffs with little pockets where there are sandy beaches. Heather and Hudson climbed among the rocks, but I played granny and stayed behind because I don't need another broken wrist!

We had such a good time that we extended our stay by one day and spent the morning together. Then, Wiley and I left around lunch and stopped in Pismo Beach (about half way home) for the night. The campground there is right on the ocean. We had a quiet night and were home by lunchtime on Tuesday. I went right back to work because the managers were at a convention in Nevada. My fellow Workamper and I have been running the office and caring for the managers' dogs. They just got back today.

It's a great life!

2/18/08 (Monday): I'm sitting in my own bed, but the bed is located in Moss Landing, California! It's neat to have your own home with you wherever you travel! The reason I'm sitting in bed at 6:45 on a Monday morning (other than the obvious fact that I'm retired and can get up whenever I please), is that my grandson, Austin, is still asleep in the bed in the living room. He's our first overnight visitor in this RV. I guess the bed is pretty comfortable, because he's normally an early riser like his Granny!

I've had a wonderful birthday weekend with my son and his family. We took our time driving here--about 6 hours. Route 101 travels close to the coast for the first half of the trip and some stunning views of the Pacific Ocean. Then it turns inland and travels through farmland. Here's a link to a map of our route: Piru to Moss Landing, CA. We saw fields of strawberries just starting to ripen, cabbage, celery, broccoli and artichokes. I'd always thought of California as a movie and tourist kind of a place, but it's actually the #1 agricultural state in the U.S. Castroville, one of the last towns we passed through before we got to Moss Landing, is the artichoke capital of the world. The picture of the artichoke field is courtesy of the Pezzini Farms website. Check it out! The restaurants in the area advertise deep fried artichokes. I'll have to try that sometime.

Moss Landing is a cute little town on Monterey Bay (see the link to the map). It has a small downtown with a couple of antique shops and restaurants.










It's a real, working fishing village. One of the last in California.












We can walk to the beach from our KOA campground, which is on Elkhorn Slough (pronounced "slew"). Elkhorn Slough Reserve is on the Pacific Fly Way, where over 350 bird species have been reported. We took a half-day kayak trip that was one of the neatest things I've every done! Mark and Austin paddled one kayak and Hudson and I did the other. Everywhere you looked there were birds, harbor seals, sea lions and sea otters. The sea otters are absolutely adorable. You just want to hug them! (I'm sure they smell awful, but you get the idea!) The kayak concessionaire told us that we should paddle like heck if they swam toward us, because they'll climb right up onto the kayaks!

I'm going to close this blog for now and finish up later. I have some more photos on the camera that I didn't download yet. So stay tuned!

2/15/08 (Friday): Happy birthday to me! We're in Moss Landing, near Monterey for the long weekend. Mark and his family are joining us, and we're going to have some fun! But I'm behind in my blogging, so I'll talk about the fun time we had last weekend in the Channel Islands.

It was a gorgeous day, and we celebrated our anniversary with a trip to the Channel Islands. They're close (about 30 miles) off the coast of Ventura. It was COLD on the Pacific, so we were glad we had our coats with us. We look like refugees, don't we?!

On the way out of the harbor, we passed this "pirate ship."






There were lots of offshore oil rigs.


The Channel Islands are sometimes called the Galapagos of the U.S. because they were never attached to the mainland. This isolation caused unique animals and plants to evolve. There are five islands: Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel, and Santa Barbara. The ferry was scheduled to go to Santa Cruz, the biggest of the Channel Islands, so we didn't have a choice as to which island we'd visit.

We were hoping to see some whales on the trip over. The Santa Barbara Channel between Ventura and the Channel Islands is a major migration route for gray whales. But we hit the two week period when the migration south ends and the migration north hasn't yet begun, so we didn't see any. We did see offshore oil rigs, sea lions, an elephant seal and lots of sea birds. There was also a lot of shipping in the area, including this large container ship. The captain said there were about 30 carago ships a day.



We docked at this tiny pier in Scorpion Harbor (I don't know why it's called that).












The water was deep and very clear with lots of kelp. There were numerous fish swimming among the long strands of kelp.







There were some large rocks in Scorpion Harbor, and one of them was an arch that you could see all the way through. It's hard to see in this picture. It's in the middle rock.



In addition to the natural history on the island, there was also lots of cultural history, including remnants of Chumash Native American Indians and ranching. There were a dozen Chumash villages that were home to over 1,000 people. They mined chert deposits for tools and produced money from shells found only on the island as a major trade item by tribes throughout California. They used large plank canoes, called “tomols" to travel between islands and to the mainland.

The remains of ranches and lots of ranching equipment are also scattered around the island. We saw an adobe ranch house and barn, an outhouse (that's Wiley in the outhouse!) an ice house and lots of equipment like this old tractor.

There was also a huge oven that produced bread for the entire island and is still intact. That's an ice house that Wiley's peering into.

According to legend, Santa Cruz Island was named for a priest’s staff accidentally left on the island by Spanish explorers in 1769. A Chumash Indian found it and returned it to the priest. The Spaniards were so impressed by the friendly people that they named it “La Isla de Santa Cruz,” the Island of the Sacred Cross. The Nature Conservancy owns and manages the western three quarters of the island and the National Park Service owns and manages the rest.

A ranger met us and we were given the option of taking a tour with the ranger or hiking on our own. We opted to hike part way with the ranger and then took off on our own. The ranger told us about many of the unique plants we saw along the way and the history and geology of the islands. When we got to the top of the trail, we left the ranger and then headed off on our own for Potato Cove. It was very steep, but the views were breathtaking!











Turn on your sound and hear how winded I am as I narrate this video from the top of the island!

After the hike to Potato Cove, we turned around, went back down the big hill and then back up again and hiked to the other end of the island on the crest trail. There were views of the ocean all around us as we hiked the backbone of the island. The white stuff on the trail ahead of Wiley is diotomaceous earth, which is made up of millions of one-celled sea critters. It's used in many scientific processes and in pool filters.


It was a fantastic day. We've made some wonderful memories in California.

2/10/08 (Sunday): Believe it or not, this is my 195th posting since I first started blogging! And it's going to be a long one, so buckle up.

First the breaking news: we've accepted a position for summer '08 at the Boone KOA in Boone, NC. Here's a link to their site: Boone KOA. We're excited--it's exactly what we've been looking for. It'll be cool in the mountains, we'll be near Blue Ridge Parkway, Grandfather Mountain and a new Nature Conservancy property (Elk Knob). There's lots of hiking, the New River and all the Appalachian culture that we enjoy. So, there should be some good blogs this summer! We'll leave here March 31, which is the date we contracted for, and need to be there by April 25. That'll give us time to visit some of the things we missed on the trip out (the Grand Canyon, Painted Desert, Petrified Forest) and to have a short visit with the Dykes clan in Florida. I hate to leave here--we really love the area and the people we work with. But summers are brutal and very crowded here, so we think it's wise for us to leave while we're still loving it.

Now, on to our adventures over the last two weeks. After I worked 10 days in a row without a break, we took Sunday off and went downtown.





Our first stop (off the Metro) was Hollywood. We admired the Metro station and then walked along Hollywood and Vine checking out the stars.










In the same area is the historic Plantages Theater, which is currently showing the play "Wicked." It's about the witches in The Wizard of Oz." The web site says: "Long before Dorothy drops in, two other girls meet in the Land of Oz. One, born with emerald green skin, is smart, fiery and misunderstood. The other is beautiful, ambitious and very popular. Wicked follows these two unlikely friends and college roomates grow into very different women: The Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch." I'd have enjoyed seeing the play, but Wiley isn't into that kind of thing, and it's probably expensive. The theater is supposed to be fantastic inside--art deco.

According to Wikipedia.com, the Pantagaes theater "was designed by architect B. Marcus Priteca, it was the last theatre built for the impresario Alexander Pantages. The palatial Art Deco theatre opened on June 4th, 1930, as part of the Pantages Theatre Circuit. It was built mainly for vaudeville and later showed first-run movies . During the Great Depression, it was forced to economize and thereafter operated primarily as a movie theatre, though live entertainment was presented occasionally. Pantages sold the Hollywood landmark in 1932 to Fox West Coast Theaters. In 1949, Howard Hughes acquired the Pantages under his RKO Theatre Circuit and moved his personal offices to the building's second floor. From 1949 through 1959, the theatre hosted the American motion picture industry's annual Academy Award Ceremonies. It continued to be a major venue for Road show movies into the 1970s. From 1965, it was operated by Pacific Theatres. The Pantages closed as a movie theatre in January, 1977, and re-opened the following month with Bubbling Brown Sugar, the first of the many stage productions that have since become its regular fare."

Next stop was the LaBrea Tar Pits and Page Museum.








This was much cooler than I'd expected it to be. There's a big park in downtown L.A. where tar (it's actually asphalt, a form of crude oil) bubbles up out of the ground. The whole area floats on a sea of oil.





Native Americans used the oil in numerous ways, including coating the baskets with it to make them waterproof. As we got near the area, it smelled like they were paving a thousand streets--it actually made my eyes water!










The sticky tar trapped animals. Other animals came to prey on the trapped animals and became trapped themselves. Apparently, it's a misconception that the animals sank into the tar. It only takes an inch or two of tar over a large enough area to trap a big animal. Even today, they find many birds and small animals trapped in the tar. Many of the fossillized remains are on exhibit in the museum.

We were lucky enough to arrive just in time for a tour. We went to excavation pit 91, where you looked through a glass window down into a pit that was about 15 feet deep. There was a catwalk built over the tar (which is not hot, by the way--the bubbles that come up are escaping methane gas). The paleontologists lie on the boards and muck out the fossils. It's absolutely filthy, disgusting looking work. But it was fascinating to realize we were looking at the bones of animals that roamed the area up to 2,000,000 years ago!

After that exciting day off, I went back to work on Sunday. We had a visit from the head of our company, and put together an outdoor lunch. It was fun to get all our new workers together and meet with the man who runs things. As we finished up, one of the rangers spotted five condors circling the campground. You non-birders out there can skip this part, but birders from all over the world come to this part of California hoping for a glimpse, and we had them flying right over our picnic table! They were so close that we could see the number tags on their wings! What a thrill. I happened to have my camera (but not my binocular camera) with me. It's not a great shot, but it's my record of a thrilling moment!

We took our guest on a tour of the campground, and I took this shot from the hill overlooking the campground where the water tower is. Julie mentioned that she'd like to see an overview of the campground, but it's so big that's not possible. This shot encompasses the whole campground, but it's hard to tell because of the trees. The building you see on the left is the bath house. Our RV is on the far right side of this picture, under the trees. We can't see the lake from our camper because it's down the hill.


I worked Sunday through Thursday, but we took off Friday, Saturday and Sunday this week. We took a drive up to Frazier Mountain to see the snow. It was shirt-sleeve weather, but the snow was everywhere above 4,000 feet. We had a lovely drive through the mountains.


Wiley and I celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary on February 7 with dinner at The Elephant bar, an African themed restaurant. We had a great meal and the atmosphere was quite nice.








Our anniversary present to each other was a trip to the Channel Islands. I think this blog has gotten long enough, though, so I'll blog about that another time. Talk to you again soon!