26 April 2002

Good morning, all. Yesterday was once again good. We left in the mid-morning and drove north, over the Golden Gate (but we didn't stop in the little park -- we'll do that later if Ceej wants to get better pictures etc.). Had lunch at the Pelican Inn up in Marin. For those of you who have driven up Highway 1, it's the inn where you turn to go to Muir Beach. British food. They had sherry trifles available for dessert, although we did not avail ourselves of them. They had bangers and mash. (Again, not for us.) They had shepherd's pie. They proved that British food is, too, Ethnic. And they had lovely tiny blue flowers outside, which Ceej tried to photograph. We haven't traded pictures yet, so I don't know how that turned out. I really will make a project of cropping these pictures and putting them on the web, but I've been a tiny little bit busy lately.

We drove on to Pt. Reyes. In case you're unfamiliar with NoCal geography, Pt. Reyes is a bit of the south that has broken off and drifted northward over the last several thousand years. In the next several thousand, it'll work its way up to Alaska. Isn't geological time cool? We attempted to find the earthquake trail, where you can see how a fence was displaced in the earthquake, exactly where the fault line is. But last time we were there, it was November (of '00), and the grass was much, much lower. So. We wandered around in some eucalyptus and enjoyed it anyway, despite the lack of earthquakey stuff. Got back in the car and drove out to the lighthouse. Windy. Rather chilly and very, very windy. And the parking is considerably further from the actual lighthouse than one thinks it'll be. Not a problem, but typical of my Pt. Reyes day: everything was just that much further than I thought it'd be. So we didn't see even close to everything, and we were a bit late getting Timprov from home and driving across to get Mark from Palo Alto. But we had good Cuban food and mojitos, so. (I remembered why I don't go to bar-like places. La Bodeguita del Medio has a restaurant area and a bar area, and we were seated in the bar area because we came at prime dining time for silly California. And it was loud. Also, the statue of Ernest Hemingway stared at Timprov throughout the meal -- accusingly, I might say. But I don't think most bar-like places have statues of Hemingway, so mostly it's the loud part that factors in.)

I've got a story I'd like to write, set at Pt. Reyes. It's in the series with "MacArthur Park" and "Glass Wind" (comes between them chronologically), so I hope the pictures we took will help when it comes time to write the story. I didn't make a lot of notes, though. We have a Pt. Reyes map. We can go back if we need to. It was not, in its essence, a story research trip. It was an "enjoy time with Ceej" trip. And it definitely worked for that. I'm kind of amazed at how little I've been fussing about getting stuff done. The dishwasher needs emptying. The trash needs taking out (which we'll do when we go today, if not before). I've written a few paragraphs a day, but not a lot, on the lunar epoxy story. I'm waaaay behind on e-mail and will be more so, I'm sure, by the time Ceej leaves. I couldn't do this permanently, but it's a very nice...um...vacation. Good heavens. It really is one of those. Go figure.

The plan for today is to go south. If Timprov is feeling awake and up for it, we'll head down to Monterey to the aquarium there. (He hasn't been.) Otherwise, we'll probably see redwoods at Big Basin Redwood State Park. Muir Woods is very cool, but I've been a couple of times recently and haven't been down to Big Basin, and we're likely to head north again next week to hike on Mt. Tam. I'm going to work a bit, talk to Timprov, and maybe catch up on e-mail a bit, depending on how long C.J. sleeps. Have a good morning.