redwoods and funiculars
So Saturday was a reasonably quiet day -- it was my father's birthday, for a start. I slept in until 8 (or 11 on my body clock) which seemed like I got the present.
The day was fairly quiet... in the morning I went with my father on his daily constitutional through town and mediated a "vigourous" debate between the parents about whether there was a rattle in his car (my adjudication: an intermittent creak from somewhere in the back, not audible at anything over 15 miles an hour).
After lunch my mother and I went for a walk up in Big Basin state park, which is full of redwoods and goes all the way down to the Pacific. It's very well run, with well maintained trails and so on. It was also packed with people out enjoying the day, so we ended up driving a ways along the fire trail and then going for a walk. Initially my mother, who walks through her 4 - 5 rounds of golf a week, was giving me grief about not keeping up, although in my defense I walk with small slow people a lot. However, as time went by she started to get worn down by the heat -- about 90F / 32C but very low humidity, so I was actually feeling very comfortable for a change...
Walking through was very cool -- I never can quite get over just how tall redwoods are, and as we were walking we were stirring up small clouds of moths that looked like leaves on the ground, with dark brown wings which were a lighter almost yellow brown underneath -- almost like autumn in reverse.
[Did I mention that my parents' house is surrounded by redwoods? And that it's really unnerving to sit on their deck waiting for dinner to cook through on the grill and see a couple of the "smaller" ones, ie maybe 100' or 30 odd meters swaying in the breeze?]
There was a brief comedy of errors when we got back into the car, specifically my father's which we had driven so my adjudication could be adjudicated, and couldn't get the air-conditioning to work... cue complaints from the maternal side of the car and a lot of pushing of buttons at cross-purposes from one another...
My visit and the birthday were more than enough to merit dinner out, so we drove down to a restaurant called Shadowbrook which is right by the coast, perched by a creek at the bottom of a hill... you can walk down through gardens or take their little funicular. As we arrived the mist was coming in off the sea, so it was a good 30 degrees F / 17 degrees C cooler than up in the hills. A good dinner all round, and no-one collapsed from overeating. My second birthday gift to my dad was to make only one rude comment about the extent to which his dinner overlapped with the current prescribed diet -- and now that I know he's reading this blog, that's a little reminder!
The day was fairly quiet... in the morning I went with my father on his daily constitutional through town and mediated a "vigourous" debate between the parents about whether there was a rattle in his car (my adjudication: an intermittent creak from somewhere in the back, not audible at anything over 15 miles an hour).
After lunch my mother and I went for a walk up in Big Basin state park, which is full of redwoods and goes all the way down to the Pacific. It's very well run, with well maintained trails and so on. It was also packed with people out enjoying the day, so we ended up driving a ways along the fire trail and then going for a walk. Initially my mother, who walks through her 4 - 5 rounds of golf a week, was giving me grief about not keeping up, although in my defense I walk with small slow people a lot. However, as time went by she started to get worn down by the heat -- about 90F / 32C but very low humidity, so I was actually feeling very comfortable for a change...
Walking through was very cool -- I never can quite get over just how tall redwoods are, and as we were walking we were stirring up small clouds of moths that looked like leaves on the ground, with dark brown wings which were a lighter almost yellow brown underneath -- almost like autumn in reverse.
[Did I mention that my parents' house is surrounded by redwoods? And that it's really unnerving to sit on their deck waiting for dinner to cook through on the grill and see a couple of the "smaller" ones, ie maybe 100' or 30 odd meters swaying in the breeze?]
There was a brief comedy of errors when we got back into the car, specifically my father's which we had driven so my adjudication could be adjudicated, and couldn't get the air-conditioning to work... cue complaints from the maternal side of the car and a lot of pushing of buttons at cross-purposes from one another...
My visit and the birthday were more than enough to merit dinner out, so we drove down to a restaurant called Shadowbrook which is right by the coast, perched by a creek at the bottom of a hill... you can walk down through gardens or take their little funicular. As we arrived the mist was coming in off the sea, so it was a good 30 degrees F / 17 degrees C cooler than up in the hills. A good dinner all round, and no-one collapsed from overeating. My second birthday gift to my dad was to make only one rude comment about the extent to which his dinner overlapped with the current prescribed diet -- and now that I know he's reading this blog, that's a little reminder!
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