So. We got a good start in the morning and headed up through the City and over the Golden Gate. We stopped and ate in a small inn, and then kept going up to Point Reyes. As I said the day after we went, Pt. Reyes is a bit of the south that's been migrating north a bit at a time. A very small bit.

This is where we started wandering. Even the parking lot was covered with tiny wildflowers. I got "Big Yellow Taxi" in my head, only it looked like in the battle of paradise vs. pavement, paradise was winning.

Idyllic.

(From time to time, C.J. has been known to make me laugh. Go figure.)

After Ceej climbed down from the tree, we got back to the car and drove up to the Lighthouse. There's a lot of stuff I haven't done yet at Pt. Reyes, and the lighthouse was on the list. The board outside the gift and display area claimed that there had been 12 or 14 whale sightings that day, but we didn't see any.

Some of the flowers and lichen were exceedingly strange up there.

This is how they collected freshwater out at the lighthouse. It's not so scenic, but useful for the story I'm going to write set out at Pt. Reyes. I think. That's "useful, I think," not "I'm going to write, I think."

The trees by the lighthouse were so windblown they looked like giant bonsai.

I wish we'd had more time to wander around out there -- we missed the seals and the beaches and the Earthquake Trail and lots of stuff. But we had a good time fetching Timprov and Mark and having Cuban food, so that was nice in itself.

The next day was Half Moon Bay and Big Basin Redwoods State Park. And more of Highway 1. Driving down Highway 1 with Ceej, with Louis Armstrong on the CD player...quite definitely wonderful.