At Point Reyes

I thought I'd start the day's post be showing our golden rental car. I always thought that they charged you as if the car was made of gold but this time they actually provided us with a gold car. It is a Ford Focus and not too bad, except for the color. It gets good mileage. Jill says the color is beginning to grow on her. Hmmm.

We spent the day at Point Reyes National Seashore. The drive over the coastal hills from Petaluma was nice and looked like what we imagine Ireland would look like: green hills and small farms, mostly. Not much activity....we had the road to ourselves. There were lots of cows and a corral chock full of goats.

The day was mostly cloudy but there was a patch or two of sunlight. We drove up to the northern section of the park and saw some Tule Elk - there is an Elk preserve there. I'm not sure how many there are but we saw two groups and this isolated buck that was watching everything and everybody. There are a number of isolated ranches all through the Point Reyes area. These are mostly dairy operations so you get to see lots of cows and the occasional milk tanker truck.

The beach was a short walk down the hill and it was just about empty...only one other group of people there. The surf was pretty rough by our standards but we might not be good judges of that. We walked for a while but were a little shy about getting too far down the beach. The area close to the cliff was lower than most of the beach and would fill up faster if the tide came up and we would be cut off...so we stayed pretty close to the trail. The sea birds were all very busy and chasing each other. A lot of kelp had washed up on shore.

We went up to the top of Point Reyes by the lighthouse, which is several hundred feet above the ocean. From the top of the cliff you can see for miles along the beach and out to sea. This is a good whale watching spot. The California Gray Whales migrate past Point Reyes on the way to Baja California and this is the season when they should be going south along the coast. Watching for whales is sort of like watching for meteors...you don't quite know what you are looking for until you see one. Jill has good eyes and spotted them first. There was a pair swimming together that broke the surface. They were pretty far out but made a substantial disturbance in the water as they rolled and headed back down.

The lighthouse is perched on the edge of the cliff about 300 feet up from the water. As lighthouses go, it is pretty small but it doesn't need to be tall, just bright. The fog horn was blowing while we were there. The only ship we saw was a freighter heading west. The wind was pretty strong and there was a slight haze blowing off the water and up the slope.

We did all of this before getting lunch so we were getting pretty hungry. We decided to try to have lunch at Vladimir's Czechoslovakian Restaurant in Inverness. Joanne and I ate there once about 28 years ago on an earlier visit -- Vladimir was a memorable host. I spotted it as we drove through Inverness in the morning but when we got there about 2 o'clock it was closed. That was disappointing because it was really good food -- If I remembered it for 28 years, it had to be. Well, we were starving so we went to a nice cafe in Point Reyes Station which had great food...so we ate well after all.

We headed back to Petaluma by driving along Tomales Bay and then east through Marshall. We were originally going to drive up to Sebastapol and Healdsburg and stop at a winery or two but we decided we were too tired. We had a full day.