A day

So yesterday, while A, H & R went to the Monterey Aquarium . . .

(Photos by Amber)


. . .  I took a personal day and managed to get in a couple of walks around Moss Landing between batterings of wind and rain . . .

Quirky town. Lots of creativity all over the place . . .

Ocean!

(Apologies for the small type. I can't correct it.)

I think everyone on the west coast, and probably points beyond, felt the effects of the two weather fronts that passed through last weekend. We decided to pay attention and stayed put in Bakersfield for three days, (for the record: staying first at Orange Grove RV Park where we picked more oranges! and then at Bakersfield RV Resort)  where we caught up on laundry and grocery shopping, and managed a little geocaching as well. We had some big rainfalls and some big wind, but only at night, and managed to escape the worst of the storms. This meant changing our plans and missing our chance to get up close and personal with the elephant seals north of Morro Rock, a disappointment, but so it goes. 

Oilfields on the way out of Bakersfield -- as far as the eye can see.

The hills were alive with wildflowers on the way into Bakersfield from Temecula. Apparently not a common occurrence.

I had to stick my hand in a hole in a palm tree to find this geocache in Bakersfield. But I did, and it was there!

Amber found this cool sign in Bakersfield, a town filled with neat photo ops.

And yes, we visited the peacocks again. Who can resist?

Sandy hills on Alfred Harrell Hwy on outskirts of B'field.

This was a hard geocache find at River Walk Park in Bakersfield, but intrepid Amber persevered.

Yesterday, Wednesday, we drove northwest to Moss Landing, on Monterey Bay, and we're all glad to be back near the ocean. We had fish for dinner last night at Phil's Fish Market , a funky popular spot with live bluegrass music (where, despite a substantial local fishery, they serve farmed salmon!!!-- go figure), and today did some exploring. 

Phil's Fish Market

Moss Landing is a curious little village (population 204), at one time a whaling station, currently dominated by a huge gas power plant towering above a block-long main street with cool-looking storefronts, a B&B, two alluring Mexican restaurants, two marine research facilities, a working fishing harbour and marina, and the Elkhorn Estuary (one of the top 10 birding areas in the US), which is chock-full of sea otters and the aforementioned birds. Not to mention a whole bunch of beaches with crashing waves, a few surfers, and miles of dunes. There's no grocery store, but up on the highway a produce stand  sells 7 avacadoes for $1 and 5 artichokes for $1. (We're very close to Castroville, "the artichoke capitol of the world".) We all quite like it here.

The Whole Enchilada, a cool-looking Moss Landing restaurant.

We're staying at the Moss Landing Express KOA, which is also a curious little place. We've never much cottoned to KOAs: they tend to be expensive with facilities that don't match the price. But it's one of only two or three RV parks close to the Monterey Aquarium that fits us, and so we picked it. Like the town, it's kind of funky, but it has good showers and is close to everything in town -- but then everything here is close to everything in town, so that's a dubious attribute. 

Gas-fired power plant. On the way in, it was shrouded in fog. Spooky.

House on the Slough at Moss Landing.

Moss Landing's economy is based largely on the power plant, a 600-boat marina, and the estuary (see the otter).

Moss Landing State Beach backs up against the estuary, which is one of the best places in the world(!)  to see sea otters -- almost made extinct in the 17- and 1800s, mostly because of a demand for otter fur hats.  Their fur is an astounding million hairs per square inch, and the cute little critters are always grooming themselves to keep the fur healthy. They tend to be fairly solitary creatures, but here they loll about adorably in groups and are a lot of fun to watch, even though apparently their true nature can be quite violent.

Violent? Moi?

 

Sea otter group, lolling together, not usual for the species.

 

Elkhorn Slough from Moss Landing State Beach

We got to chatting with a surfer on the beach, and on his advice, after getting our fill of otters and surf, we drove north to Capitola, also on Monterey Bay, just south of Santa Cruz, in search of a beach that wasn't as open to crashing waves and riptides. We found it in this slightly faded but nifty town that claims it was the first seaside resort in the state, where we had some lunch, then just hung out, some of us playing for a l-o-n-g time on the sought-after sheltered beach, an activity which the same some of us had missed terribly. Even though the desert is full of sand, it ain't the same. Others of us strolled around the downtown beach area, noting some charming looking hotels, lots of vacation rentals, many galleries and restaurants, and an old wooden wharf.

 

Lunch at Zelda's

Lots of beachside hotels and vacation homes in Capitola

Ron on the wharf

Downtown street in Capitola

Homes on Soquel Creek just before it empties into Monterey Bay in Capitola.

Flower on a wall.

The desert is nice, we all agree, but we do love our beaches.

Goodbye Gomorrah

We have left Palm Springs! And it's not really Gomorrah, it just sounded good. I suppose it's as Gomorrah as you want it to be. For us, as it happens, not so much. We had a good time: H improved his aquatic skills, we saw a few things, had a few dinners out, did a bit of shopping, played a little golf, and we really enjoyed being out of the rain, but we were a little shy on Gormorrah stuff.

The last night in PS, H got a new hat!

And before that,  A&H went to the Living Desert where they got to ride a camel . . .

. . . feed a giraffe . . .

. . . and brush a goat, among other things.

We left yesterday morning under cloudy skies, and are heading right into the same kind of weather that we left when we arrived a month ago -- EL NIÑO IS BACK!!! -- but not for a day or two, so we carry on. We are in Acton, California, in the Antelope Valley -- high desert country -- and we've come to see the poppies at the Antelope Valley California Poppy Preserve.

The Preserve is a state-run park on 1800 acres in the Antelope Buttes area

One never knows when the poppies are going to burst forth into bloom (along with other sympathetic cacti and wildflowers), or how splendid it's going to be. It's different from year to year -- depending on the weather, but given that there was a lot of rain this year and it has been unseasonably hot lately, we were hoping that we might luck out and see the sight in all its glory. Alas it was not to be. But we did see its beginnings, with scattered concentrations of bright orange poppies and a few intrepid lupins and several species of charming yellow blossoms here and there, so all was not lost. And it wasn't all that hard to imagine what it would look like if you caught a good year at the right time. Plus we had a lovely walk up and down hills along the trails and saw meadlowlarks and hawks and beetles and lizards and miles and miles of rolling hills. It was beautiful. We were very glad we came.

The greatest abundance of California Poppies grow in the Antelope Valley.

Beetle behaviour was riveting for some of us.

Western Fence Lizard.

There are nine miles of trails here, but no antelope anywhere in the valley, not  anymore.

The Joshua trees are just starting to bloom.

A few patches of poppies and other wildflowers gave us an idea of what it might look like.

Another reality of the high desert.

A little rest near the top of Antelope Butte. Windy day.

After we left the preserve, we topped the day off with a hunt for a geocache -- which was successful and especially rewarding because no one had visited this one for a year. And we were rewarded by a lovely field of wildly orange poppies against the light green shrub they call rabbit brush. This was all followed by a visit to the same park we stopped at last time through, with time on the teeter-totters and some fun play with a nice little girl named Audrey.

M&H examine a good geocache find (by intrepid A) in the middle of a patch of desert -- and the only clue was "Bush".

It hadn't been logged for a year, but there was still lots of neat stuff inside the cache. H traded an action figure for an orange plastic heart.

Usually we just drive through this area without stopping, so it was neat to stay for a couple of days and get a sense of the place. Acton, Palmdale and Lancaster have histories in their own right, mostly related to mining and the aerospace industry (Edwards AFB, of aerospace fame, is here), but lately they have become bedroom communities for LA, which, along with other factors, has caused the population to explode. There are a lot of large impressive looking homes around, and in Acton the hills are covered in small tidy ranches, mostly horse with a few llamas thrown in. Tipi Hendren, who starred in Hitchock's The Birds, gave up being a movie star soon after she became one and built an exotic animal sanctuary, Shambala, which is in Acton. The California State Prison system has a facility in Lancaster, home to 127,312 inmates, which also, um,  impacts the demographic. The area is alive with shopping malls, which look busy enough, but according to one fellow we met who has lived his whole life here,  Lancaster and Palmdale are tough towns with many problems, like homelessness, drugs, prostitution, and high unemployment. "There are places, just a block off the main street of Lancaster, where it's not safe to go," he said. He's a Cruz man, himself, but thought Trump would be okay, too. "People are fed up with Washington politicians," he said. It's a refrain. It's a movement. Look out.

The California State Prison facility at Lancaster, right on the road to the Poppy Preserve.

Sign on the notice board at the local organic grocery store in Acton. A theme.

Another sign on the local bulletin board. Pick your side.

R&H supervising a concrete crew at the RV park. The  man on the right had a lot to say about a lot of stuff.

It's been an interesting couple of days. We are off tomorrow, but even though we have a plan, we have yet to sit down with the weather forecast, which is pretty much about huge downpours, high winds, high surf and/or snow where geographically appropriate, in pretty much every direction except the one from whence we came. Hmm. Stay tuned.

Acton sunset (looking west toward LA).