On the Road Again

While trying to stay on top of my coursework and plan our upcoming cross-country move, Darling Wife and I are also on a whirlwind tour of California.

A couple of weeks ago, we spent the weekend camping in Pinnacles National Monument. It is not a place I'd recommend during 75% of the year; it is dry, hot, and utterly inhospitable during our long summers and falls. But right now, it is beautiful. Wildflowers were everywhere, and we saw TWO condors! When I was a child, I watched a program about California condors and the frenzied efforts to reverse their declining numbers and belay their impending extinction. At the time, condors were remote and unreal to me. They lived, the 22 that still lived, in the extreme west in areas that existed for me only in old westerns from my grandfather's day. And even today, though their danger of extinction has lessened, they are hardly common. I never thought I'd see one, especially not in the wild. We caught a glimpse of one a few summers back from a shuttle bus at the Grand Canyon, but this was radically different. After a three-mile hike up the sloping side of a mountain, Darling Wife and I broke onto a bare ridge and saw first one, then another condor soaring almost at eye level over the canyon below. The distance obscured the beasts enormous size, the largest of all raptors, but it was still an amazing sight.

Last weekend, we hiked to the broad valley that was the subject of my last post. We took our dogs and had a picnic under an enormous Valley Oak by the side of a pond. The dogs played, happy to be free of their leashes, and we sat on a blanket drinking sauvignon blanc and eating strawberries and hummus. Mmmm.

This weekend, we are going to Death Valley. I'm not sure if there is symbolism to be found in that, give that this weekend is also the Easter holiday, but if so, it is not intentional. I'll let you know how the trip goes next week.