California Day Four
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Waking early I serenely fell back to sleep until my late alarm at 8 a.m. Amazing that, because the hotel was filled with girls youth soccer teams. They were up early, boisterously so.
Next door there is a diner and the hotel offers, in lieu of free breakfast, a five dollar voucher. It was not nearly enough. This is not a diner, at least not East Coast style. Maybe all diners in California charge $4.75 for a glass of orange juice. And it was a regular size glass, nothing jumbo about it. Five dollars? Really? Don't they grow the freakin' fruit just down the road?
I got a short stack of pancakes, which was more than enough and a cup of coffee. That's it. My voucher still covered just half my breakfast expenditure.
Guess the Greeks haven't found California yet.
Last night I was perusing the hotel information booklet. A listing under “area attractions” caught my eye, a warbirds museum. This morning I arrived at Estrella Warbirds, walked in just behind a classic car club, one of whose members apparently was also a member of the museum. The delightfully sweet, older lady who took my 10 dollars, suggested I join the car club's tour as it was just getting started.
Notice how you always find old people at museums?
The guy leading the tour was a WWII pilot, met Pappy Boyington, in person. He gave a delightful tour. I ended up spending more time here than even Monterey Bay Aquarium. The old fellow had a story for every exhibit. He kept promising to speed up the tour, then drifted off into another story. We won't have these guys around for very much longer. Hopefully they will be replaced by other old guys who flew in Vietnam or Iraq.
It is the same at the New England Air Museum. If you go there on certain days, they have pilots who actually flew, in combat, the same type of plane you are viewing. Each pilot stands next to the kind of plane he flew and tells stories. What it really was like.
How amazing it must be for those who were there and came out alive. I am too old now to serve. But I always wonder how my life would have turned had I accepted a Marine Corps commission straight out of college. I would not have been a pilot. My eyes require correction.
I am not sure where, or how, I would have served. And that is a big factor that kept me out of the military. I was not afraid to go to some troubled land. It was that I was not so ready to surrender my destiny so completely. With my college and writing ability, I could well have ended up behind a desk. What good is joining the Marines if you don't get to blow something up?
“All man's achievements pale in comparison to war.” It was a tank commander who said that, a Californian named George Patton. And when you look at the millions of dollars of airborne death machines, now museum pieces, you glimpse only a sliver of what Patton said.
The museum encompassed most all of aviation. There was a not so good model of the Wright flyer. Some very interesting WWI artifacts, the war to end all wars.
All the WWII planes, except for a Douglass Bomber, were in hangers. They have some scout planes, small stuff and the big bomber.
Parked outside are a collection of fighter planes from various wars, starting with Korea. They have the Saber Jet, a plane I have always admired. It was the jet plane model I played with as a kid. Famous MiG killer. Compact, powerful and those menacing six, 50 caliber machine guns sticking out of the nose.
Also is the similarly built Douglass A6 Intruder. I have been fascinated with the plane since reading “Flight of the Intruder.” Like the Saber, the Intruder is a stubby plane. Pilot and bombardier sit side by side. Unlike the Sabre, Intruder carries no guns or missiles to defend itself. It relied instead upon its speed and radar jamming equipment.
My morning melted into the past.
When I suited up to go the sun was so bright I optimistically donned my fingerless gloves. I was hoping to come back from California with the telltale tanned patches on the back of my hands that only a fellow biker would recognize. After an exit or two on the Interstate, I got off to switch to winter gloves. It was warm enough, at least, that I did not need my heaviest set of insulated winter gloves.
Clouds were all around, hovering over the mountains again. Intrinsically I understand convection and precipitation. It is another thing to see it demonstrated so clearly. You don't get the same effect back East.
Here you are riding down Route 101 South on a pool table flat plain. On either side of you are what appear to be scrub covered hills. Except some of these rise up 1, 2, 3 thousand feet, some up to five, in a very short distance.
Our mountains are much more gradual. There are lots of trees disguising the rise in elevation. You can't get so close to Eastern mountains without first traveling through Piedmont and hills. In California you look across the plains and, zoom, the mountains leap up from the plain. Can you imagine getting here in an ox-drawn wagon? Knowing where the passes are would be critical.
Again today I had to squeeze through the mountains at the end of the valley. When I did, I got rained upon again. Not a lot. On the other side I was back skirting the Pacific Ocean. It's winds drove the clouds inland to the mountains. The air was cool still, too cool for what I had hoped from this trip. But at least today the sun shown most all my ride.
My target today was the Santa Barbara zoo. They have meerkats and I was hoping to get some good pictures, or at least see how they were exhibited. (Such are the sumer attraction at The Maritime Aquarium where I work.) Only when I approached the ticket booth the sign said the exhibit was closed today. I did not go in.
By now it was 3:00 and I was maybe an hour above L.A. I'm thinking I don't want to stay in L.A. I don't want to ride into L.A. anywhere near 5 p.m. And I am not sure I have enough time, or warmth, left in the day to cross the sprawling city for something better on the south side.
I backtracked through Santa Barbara and found a boutique hotel for tonight. It's a little pricey at $124, that was $20 off the regular rate, or so they told me.
Santa Barbara says it is “America's Riviera.” Funny, South Beach, Fla., says the same thing on the right coast.
Santa Barbara has more bums than South Beach. Here the bums are very scruffy looking. The ocean front is littered with them, gathered in clans, sleeping alone surrounded by their piles. The dodge is on and they all have their hands out, some with signs declaring their hunger.
I always wonder what these guys were like in high school. They had access to the same free education as us all. I wonder, did they waste it? Were they too young to see the value?
Well even Jesus said, “The poor will always be with us.” That's some cold hearted reality from Emmanuel, the God among us.
Santa Barbara offers a long jogging, walking, bicycling path sandwiched between the main road and beach.
I had time to go for a run along the beach on the path with the sound of waves and seagulls. Geeze, I gotta get back in shape. My hotel is at the northern end of the path. I never ran far enough to see the southern end.
Tonight I am eating out on a pier, overlooking the harbor, channel buoys blinking red and green outside the window; remember, red right return.
After dinner I now walked the long path back to my hotel, enjoying a good cigar picked up in Monterey yesterday. A chilly wind comes off the ocean. I zip my rain jacket all the way up my neck and fasten the snap to hold it close, push my free hand (one required to tend the cigar) down deep into the pocket. Shouldn't complain. It is February after all.
Just as I am finding my relaxation, I am nearly out of time. Tomorrow, Sunday, is predicted for rain. I haven't yet decided what to do. Riding all day in the rain is not my first choice.
Los Angeles is like a gulf, a dead zone of urbanization, that I must cross to get back to scenery. I have to MapQuest it out to see if I should try. The bike isn't due until Tuesday morning. But I have IMAX meetings at 6 and 7 pm on Monday. So I will turn the bike in Monday before Eagle Rider closes at 5. That means I really have one and a half days left of vacation.
Showing posts with label Eagle Rider. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eagle Rider. Show all posts
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
California Day One
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Los Angeles to Pismo Beach, California
Well the netbook booted just fine after riding all day in the saddlebag.
What an amazing first day. Is it better, I wonder, to have your best day of vacation be the first, or the last day?
Yesterday was mostly all airplane. So it counts as a work day. The time difference between East and West Coast caused me not a bit of trouble. Being a world champion sleeper, and having shorted myself with preparations Monday night, I simply slept through the extra three hours last night. Easy.
I woke refreshed and finally surrendered my watch to California time.
After breakfast I caught a cab from my LAX Travelodge Hotel to nearby Eagle Rider motorcycle rentals. Business acquaintance Mark Bastarache of Business Network hooked me into a discounted Harley-Davidson rental. I picked up a beautiful Road Glide, blue, for my trip on the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), U.S. 1.
Hey, wait a minute. How can we have two U.S. Route Ones? There's one of those on the East Coast too. Our part of the country being settled so much sooner, surely we were first. Shouldn't California's be U.S. Route Two?
Everybody at Eagle Rider was great. I packed the bike, left a bag behind with my Aquarium business wear for the IMAX convention next week and promptly made my first foray onto the famous Los Angeles freeways. Yes, they are as bad as you have heard.
My task was to shoot up the 405 to catch 10 west to Route 1 north. Seems simple, right?
Well thinking myself clever, I opted for the car pool lane. It was the only lane appearing reliable. The others were rubber banding severely at every exit and on-ramp.
Unfortunately once in the lane I felt bound by the double yellow line. There had been broken white lines here and there where cars could merge in and out of the car pool lane. I entered at a set. But when Route 10 appeared, no broken lines did. By the time I determined to sneak across, I had missed my exit. I might have made it on I-84 back home. But in L.A., once out of the car pool lane there were still five lanes to cross to make the exit.
I went on by I-10 and took Santa Monica Boulevard exit. Based upon my glance at the map before I left, I figured how far can it be to the ocean? So I turned left, west, and started down the Boulevard. Hey, just like the popular song, “All I wanna do is have some fun, I gotta feeling I'm not the only one . . . 'till the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard.”
Only the “Boulevard” looked very much like a dirty, gritty, four lane city street with curbside parking and a stop light every block. After a bit of this I figured it was not what I sought for vacation riding. Glancing at my AAA Triptik map, I turned left again, heading back south to pick up I-10.
A bit more stop and go city driving and I was zipping along again, headed as west as you can go in the U.S.A., to the Pacific Coast Highway. I was there in no time.
(Yeah, I know Hawaii is further west than this. And Alaska stretches nearly to Russia, just ask Sarah Palin. Let's not get technical. Okay?)
Weather was gorgeous. An above average 80 degrees. Sunshine. Brilliant Sunshine. It felt great!
Seems to me the only way to survive New England is to get the heck out to someplace warm at least once per winter. But then again, I did not grow up there, so I am not fully acclimatized.
I had started the morning with my light pair of winter gloves. When I hit the PCH I switched to fingerless, also zipped the winter liners out of my leather jacket and riding pants.
At first it was still very urban. Then there it was, the vast Pacific Ocean. Beautiful. Bluer than the Atlantic. Visibility to the horizon.
California gives every appearance of having, just very recently, fallen into the sea. To the west is the ocean. To the east are steep, very steep, hills. Sometimes the hills are maybe a mile away, sometimes they reach right to the water.
There is no transition here. Steep hills, mountains even, then the sea. No Piedmont nor gently rolling hills. Only abrupt, steep, deeply cut, hills.
California's geography looks very young. Features are sharp, angular, extreme. Every where water runs it cuts very deeply into the hills and mountains. I am no geologist, but it does not look like they have a bit of granite in the place. Maybe farther back to the Sierra Nevada. But here on the coast it looks like sand and mud, not even rock. Little scrubby bushes cling to the hills and sparsely so.
Then I got to Malibu and amazingly there were houses everywhere. They were right down on the beach, with the road hard on their backs. Even crazier, houses were clinging to these obviously eroded hillsides.
I'm no architect nor engineer. Even so, it seems to me any fool can see that the soft land is continually falling into the ocean. How do the people who live in these houses sleep at night? I would be pacing the floor, on the uphill side, ready to jump out before the house tumbled down with the rest of the sand into the sea.
It is hard for me to summon much sympathy for mudslide victims. When you moved in, wasn't it obvious the hill was just waiting to let go?
On the other hand, people live in New Orleans several feet below sea level with only an Army Corps of Engineers mud dike holding the water away. In Florida they rebuild after every hurricane. Even I live along the mouth of a river supposedly protected from flooding again like it did in the 30s by several dams upstream. The year my son Trever was born, hurricane Gloria paid a visit. We didn't move inland.
I turned up Malibu Canyon Road and cranked the big Harley up the hill through twists and turns clinging on the edge of a very steep and deep canyon.
As I carved the canyon I wanted to stop and take a picture of this amazing topography. I saw turnouts, advertised by signs a quarter mile in advance. But each turnout was lined with no parking, stopping or standing signs. I didn't get it. Why have a scenic turnout, if no parking is allowed? Not knowing the local custom I rode on.
Then I saw a sign for a “vista” and there the parking signs allowed me to stay for 10 minutes. That's where I grabbed some photos.
It was amazing to me how rural the canyon was. All the sudden you went from packed city to wilderness. Such extremes compose California's charm.
As I popped out of the canyon top I rode a bit more up the mountain. It was noticeably cooler. Not knowing how far it was to the very top, I turned around and headed back down. As I entered the canyon, a sign explained the no parking, stopping, standing turnouts. It said, “slower vehicles use turnouts.”
Since the highway was only two lanes, trucks and Winnebagos and such pull into the turnouts to allow faster vehicles to pass. Glad I wasn't parked in one, defiantly taking photos. They do run trucks and trailers up and down these roads.
Back along the coast, the PCH went from two lanes to four, then back to two. Again, it went from house lined to completely rural in a matter of yards. I guess there are some hills too steep even for these crazy Californians. Or maybe there just aren't enough Californians to build out this far.
They have a unique idea of freeways here. Instead of building over or underpasses, they simply declare that “freeway ends” with “cross traffic ahead.” It's all the same road, the speed limit drops from 65 down to 55. Nothing else changes. Once past the intersections a sign declares “freeway begins” and you can crank on another 10 mph.
I actually started out on Route 101. From Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo Routes 101 and 1 have an on-again, off-again, relationship. They split at Buellton and reconnect at Pismo Beach. It is marked as though you're always switching from one to the other. There are lots of signs offering 101 access once you're on 1.
At Buellton the geography changed dramatically. The ocean was gone and I was twisting and turning through cattle country with rancheros and very few signs of civilization. Another dramatic and abrupt change in scenery.
Vandenberg Air Force Base gets the shore on this part of the PCH. It's a missile test range. So I guess they don't want to be shooting rockets over the highway. Amazingly, you drive right past rifle ranges, I mean right off the highway. You could walk to them. Fortunately they shoot away from the road.
Rather suddenly once again, the country flattend out and changed from cattle to crops. Vegetable farms and packing plants stretched for miles.
Guadalupe was a working town. It looked like a hundred farm towns I have visited. One strong main street. Plants and trucks and tractors and mud dragged onto the highway at either end of town. Dying retail in the center. Old houses built right to the road. Pool halls, bars and VFWs and churches for Sunday cures to Saturday debaucheries.
At the northern edge of town I stopped to add a few layers and switch back again to the winter gloves. The warm sun was drooping in the sky.
A glance at my vintage Triptik and San Luis Obispo seemed a reasonable target for what was left of the day. That's where Routes 1 and 101 part ways for a hundred miles, with a ridge of mountains between them.
For a bit before that, the coast cut back into Route 1 again and I was enjoying the PCH with an ocean view. Just above Pismo Beach 1 rejoins 101. And just before it does, it skirts along a coastline cliff. I saw a couple of cool hotels and then I suddenly was back up to 65 mph on the 101 freeway.
As I rocketed toward San Luis Obispo, I was having a conversation with myself inside my head. The more I talked to myself, the more I became convinced that Pismo Beach scenery back there was pretty sweet. And now I was headed back inland. It took me a few miles to decide. Then I got off an exit, crossed over, and got back on the freeway retracing my tracks back south.
It turned out to be an extraordinarily good decision.
The cliff side hotel gave me a good government rate and a beautiful room overlooking the ocean. The sun was low and warm and casting long shadows and soft colors. Out over the water there was a low line of clouds miles away.
Perched upon the cliffs, an amazing gazebo dotted an impossible point of land. Before I walked out there for a better look, I called the wifey at home. And in our less than half-hour conversation, my beautiful scenery disappeared. That low line of clouds was a fog bank. I watched it roll right over me and the hotel. The sun was still up. The ocean and cliffs were gone.
They did not reappear the next morning either.
Meanwhile the hotel restaurant was under construction. Fortunately the desk clerk steered me to “Steamers” a short walk away. The restaurant's theme is “a mile of clams.”
I also took a walk on the beach. Beach access was via about three stories of steep staircase.
Returning to the hotel, I decided to take a dip in the pool. It was heated and open until 11 p.m. The air was misty, a light drizzle going. I started out in the hot tub then took a dip in the pool and then back to the whirlpool. Had the whole pool area to myself.
Back to my room late, I dressed and finally walked out to that gazebo. The hotel had bright lights shining on the cliffs and the rocks below. Very nice.
Finally I sat out on my room's porch with my net book and tried to capture today's scenes, Pacific waves offering a bucolic symphony.
Los Angeles to Pismo Beach, California
Well the netbook booted just fine after riding all day in the saddlebag.
What an amazing first day. Is it better, I wonder, to have your best day of vacation be the first, or the last day?
Yesterday was mostly all airplane. So it counts as a work day. The time difference between East and West Coast caused me not a bit of trouble. Being a world champion sleeper, and having shorted myself with preparations Monday night, I simply slept through the extra three hours last night. Easy.
I woke refreshed and finally surrendered my watch to California time.
After breakfast I caught a cab from my LAX Travelodge Hotel to nearby Eagle Rider motorcycle rentals. Business acquaintance Mark Bastarache of Business Network hooked me into a discounted Harley-Davidson rental. I picked up a beautiful Road Glide, blue, for my trip on the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), U.S. 1.
Hey, wait a minute. How can we have two U.S. Route Ones? There's one of those on the East Coast too. Our part of the country being settled so much sooner, surely we were first. Shouldn't California's be U.S. Route Two?
Everybody at Eagle Rider was great. I packed the bike, left a bag behind with my Aquarium business wear for the IMAX convention next week and promptly made my first foray onto the famous Los Angeles freeways. Yes, they are as bad as you have heard.
My task was to shoot up the 405 to catch 10 west to Route 1 north. Seems simple, right?
Well thinking myself clever, I opted for the car pool lane. It was the only lane appearing reliable. The others were rubber banding severely at every exit and on-ramp.
Unfortunately once in the lane I felt bound by the double yellow line. There had been broken white lines here and there where cars could merge in and out of the car pool lane. I entered at a set. But when Route 10 appeared, no broken lines did. By the time I determined to sneak across, I had missed my exit. I might have made it on I-84 back home. But in L.A., once out of the car pool lane there were still five lanes to cross to make the exit.
I went on by I-10 and took Santa Monica Boulevard exit. Based upon my glance at the map before I left, I figured how far can it be to the ocean? So I turned left, west, and started down the Boulevard. Hey, just like the popular song, “All I wanna do is have some fun, I gotta feeling I'm not the only one . . . 'till the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard.”
Only the “Boulevard” looked very much like a dirty, gritty, four lane city street with curbside parking and a stop light every block. After a bit of this I figured it was not what I sought for vacation riding. Glancing at my AAA Triptik map, I turned left again, heading back south to pick up I-10.
A bit more stop and go city driving and I was zipping along again, headed as west as you can go in the U.S.A., to the Pacific Coast Highway. I was there in no time.
(Yeah, I know Hawaii is further west than this. And Alaska stretches nearly to Russia, just ask Sarah Palin. Let's not get technical. Okay?)
Weather was gorgeous. An above average 80 degrees. Sunshine. Brilliant Sunshine. It felt great!
Seems to me the only way to survive New England is to get the heck out to someplace warm at least once per winter. But then again, I did not grow up there, so I am not fully acclimatized.
I had started the morning with my light pair of winter gloves. When I hit the PCH I switched to fingerless, also zipped the winter liners out of my leather jacket and riding pants.
At first it was still very urban. Then there it was, the vast Pacific Ocean. Beautiful. Bluer than the Atlantic. Visibility to the horizon.
California gives every appearance of having, just very recently, fallen into the sea. To the west is the ocean. To the east are steep, very steep, hills. Sometimes the hills are maybe a mile away, sometimes they reach right to the water.
There is no transition here. Steep hills, mountains even, then the sea. No Piedmont nor gently rolling hills. Only abrupt, steep, deeply cut, hills.
California's geography looks very young. Features are sharp, angular, extreme. Every where water runs it cuts very deeply into the hills and mountains. I am no geologist, but it does not look like they have a bit of granite in the place. Maybe farther back to the Sierra Nevada. But here on the coast it looks like sand and mud, not even rock. Little scrubby bushes cling to the hills and sparsely so.
Then I got to Malibu and amazingly there were houses everywhere. They were right down on the beach, with the road hard on their backs. Even crazier, houses were clinging to these obviously eroded hillsides.
I'm no architect nor engineer. Even so, it seems to me any fool can see that the soft land is continually falling into the ocean. How do the people who live in these houses sleep at night? I would be pacing the floor, on the uphill side, ready to jump out before the house tumbled down with the rest of the sand into the sea.
It is hard for me to summon much sympathy for mudslide victims. When you moved in, wasn't it obvious the hill was just waiting to let go?
On the other hand, people live in New Orleans several feet below sea level with only an Army Corps of Engineers mud dike holding the water away. In Florida they rebuild after every hurricane. Even I live along the mouth of a river supposedly protected from flooding again like it did in the 30s by several dams upstream. The year my son Trever was born, hurricane Gloria paid a visit. We didn't move inland.
I turned up Malibu Canyon Road and cranked the big Harley up the hill through twists and turns clinging on the edge of a very steep and deep canyon.
As I carved the canyon I wanted to stop and take a picture of this amazing topography. I saw turnouts, advertised by signs a quarter mile in advance. But each turnout was lined with no parking, stopping or standing signs. I didn't get it. Why have a scenic turnout, if no parking is allowed? Not knowing the local custom I rode on.
Then I saw a sign for a “vista” and there the parking signs allowed me to stay for 10 minutes. That's where I grabbed some photos.
It was amazing to me how rural the canyon was. All the sudden you went from packed city to wilderness. Such extremes compose California's charm.
As I popped out of the canyon top I rode a bit more up the mountain. It was noticeably cooler. Not knowing how far it was to the very top, I turned around and headed back down. As I entered the canyon, a sign explained the no parking, stopping, standing turnouts. It said, “slower vehicles use turnouts.”
Since the highway was only two lanes, trucks and Winnebagos and such pull into the turnouts to allow faster vehicles to pass. Glad I wasn't parked in one, defiantly taking photos. They do run trucks and trailers up and down these roads.
Back along the coast, the PCH went from two lanes to four, then back to two. Again, it went from house lined to completely rural in a matter of yards. I guess there are some hills too steep even for these crazy Californians. Or maybe there just aren't enough Californians to build out this far.
They have a unique idea of freeways here. Instead of building over or underpasses, they simply declare that “freeway ends” with “cross traffic ahead.” It's all the same road, the speed limit drops from 65 down to 55. Nothing else changes. Once past the intersections a sign declares “freeway begins” and you can crank on another 10 mph.
I actually started out on Route 101. From Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo Routes 101 and 1 have an on-again, off-again, relationship. They split at Buellton and reconnect at Pismo Beach. It is marked as though you're always switching from one to the other. There are lots of signs offering 101 access once you're on 1.
At Buellton the geography changed dramatically. The ocean was gone and I was twisting and turning through cattle country with rancheros and very few signs of civilization. Another dramatic and abrupt change in scenery.
Vandenberg Air Force Base gets the shore on this part of the PCH. It's a missile test range. So I guess they don't want to be shooting rockets over the highway. Amazingly, you drive right past rifle ranges, I mean right off the highway. You could walk to them. Fortunately they shoot away from the road.
Rather suddenly once again, the country flattend out and changed from cattle to crops. Vegetable farms and packing plants stretched for miles.
Guadalupe was a working town. It looked like a hundred farm towns I have visited. One strong main street. Plants and trucks and tractors and mud dragged onto the highway at either end of town. Dying retail in the center. Old houses built right to the road. Pool halls, bars and VFWs and churches for Sunday cures to Saturday debaucheries.
At the northern edge of town I stopped to add a few layers and switch back again to the winter gloves. The warm sun was drooping in the sky.
A glance at my vintage Triptik and San Luis Obispo seemed a reasonable target for what was left of the day. That's where Routes 1 and 101 part ways for a hundred miles, with a ridge of mountains between them.
For a bit before that, the coast cut back into Route 1 again and I was enjoying the PCH with an ocean view. Just above Pismo Beach 1 rejoins 101. And just before it does, it skirts along a coastline cliff. I saw a couple of cool hotels and then I suddenly was back up to 65 mph on the 101 freeway.
As I rocketed toward San Luis Obispo, I was having a conversation with myself inside my head. The more I talked to myself, the more I became convinced that Pismo Beach scenery back there was pretty sweet. And now I was headed back inland. It took me a few miles to decide. Then I got off an exit, crossed over, and got back on the freeway retracing my tracks back south.
It turned out to be an extraordinarily good decision.
The cliff side hotel gave me a good government rate and a beautiful room overlooking the ocean. The sun was low and warm and casting long shadows and soft colors. Out over the water there was a low line of clouds miles away.
Perched upon the cliffs, an amazing gazebo dotted an impossible point of land. Before I walked out there for a better look, I called the wifey at home. And in our less than half-hour conversation, my beautiful scenery disappeared. That low line of clouds was a fog bank. I watched it roll right over me and the hotel. The sun was still up. The ocean and cliffs were gone.
They did not reappear the next morning either.
Meanwhile the hotel restaurant was under construction. Fortunately the desk clerk steered me to “Steamers” a short walk away. The restaurant's theme is “a mile of clams.”
I also took a walk on the beach. Beach access was via about three stories of steep staircase.
Returning to the hotel, I decided to take a dip in the pool. It was heated and open until 11 p.m. The air was misty, a light drizzle going. I started out in the hot tub then took a dip in the pool and then back to the whirlpool. Had the whole pool area to myself.
Back to my room late, I dressed and finally walked out to that gazebo. The hotel had bright lights shining on the cliffs and the rocks below. Very nice.
Finally I sat out on my room's porch with my net book and tried to capture today's scenes, Pacific waves offering a bucolic symphony.
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