Images of Summer

Heh. I didn't write a single post for the entire summer. It was a busy season...and it honestly seemed really long. I can't believe the kids are back in school. My life suddenly seems a little more sane, even if there's more work involved. But the summer deserves some thought. We packed a lot in those few weeks when I didn't work. And the kids were in camp the rest of the time. It was busy at the office too, so I was glad to have planned ahead. But enough of that. On with the pictures!

Smunch played on the PONY in-house All-Stars team, which plays a single weekend tournament against the other in-house teams. His team won again!

Best baseball season EVER.

Mam continued to have a successful Nova season all the way through June, although they won no more tournaments. She was often one of the stars.

We went to see the big boys play. Shocker huh? Wasn't a shocker when they lost in 13 innings either!

As soon as Nova was done, we went camping in the Redwoods...with banana slugs.

We did some hiking in the forest, including fording the little river

The kids enjoyed themselves

Best Ranger Program EVER

With a little guidance, you can find all kinds of stuff in the creek!

Aunt Karen came to visit with Spencer! and Lucas! Lucas was more lively than this most of the time.

And then we went to San Diego to visit Aunt Karen..and Spencer! and Lucas!

We went to Anza Borrego State Park on a particularly thundery day. The kids learned about flash floods!

We went to the water park...apparently water slides are exhausting!

We went boogie boarding at the beach. The kids LOVED it!

Did I mention that they LOVED it??

O.K., I thought it was pretty fun too.

And we all took a falconry class at the La Jolla Gliderport. Smunch with a Harris' Hawk.

A week later, Mam and I decided to do something Giant

...and completed the Giant Race 5K right on the field at AT&T Park.

And would you believe, that wasn't the end? We still had one more Grand adventure in store....but that requires its own post or five.

Yogini

Wikipedia definition: A Yogini is the sacred feminine force made incarnate

Wikipedia also says that a yogini is a female master practitioner of yoga. In truth, I don't know that I'll ever qualify as a "master practitioner", but I've found that yoga is a really good practice for me. I make it to a class at least weekly. I'd love to go more often, but it's hard to fit it in with everything else.

This photo displays some incredibly poor form, but you try doing yoga in jeans and heeled boots in the middle of a meadow. Dare you. The photo idea was cute anyway...

I have a few favorite teachers. These are women I really enjoy. I get something out of their classes every time I go. One of my favorites is Rebecca.

Rebecca does a "yoga retreat" on the coast every year. I missed it last year. I just didn't sign up in time. But since then, she's changed her weekly class schedule such that I can't go...and that made me extra motivated to get to her retreat at Costanoa Lodge this year.

I booked myself a little tent cabin. By tent cabin standards, this one was very nice. Electricity, queen bed, a couple chairs and, importantly, an electric blanket. Didn't manage to think about the fact that it might be COLD in November, especially in a canvas-sided cabin!

It was. It was very cold, but it looks cozy enough, doesn't it?

I arrived at Costanoa around 11:30 in the morning. Yoga didn't start until noon, so I checked in super early and wandered around a bit. We had two hours of yoga, then took a group walk to the beach, then another two hours of yoga before dinner.

Too bad I didn't take pictures of the yoga itself, but that would have been weird.

I dined with a couple of women I had seen before. I'd met one of them briefly, at a baseball meeting. The other, I'd seen at yoga classes before. It was a nice time. The restaurant was warm and the food was good. The local cats wandered in and out at will, which was kinda entertaining.

I slept with my electric blanket on all night long, but after all that yoga and walking, I slept really well. In the morning, I had a nice, quiet breakfast, packed the mommymobile and headed out to do some real exploring.

Turns out, Costanoa is really close to a state park I'd been wanting to check out, so I took a short drive to Butano State Park and set out on its "grand loop".

It was a beautiful day and this is a really beautiful park on a day like that.

I have a hiking book that highly recommended this loop, but it also said it would take me six hours to complete. It was 11 miles. I scoffed. Six hours seemed like an awfully long time for a solo hiker in pretty good shape who isn't planning to stop for a picnic. The trail I set out on was steep and it was steep for a good, long ways. I figured it was a loop and I'd have to get to the top and start going down at some point, but I kept looking at the map, in case I wimped out and needed a shortcut back. There were plenty.

Something about knowing there are plenty of options for ditching your plans makes it easier to stay on track, at least for me. The weather was sunny, but cool. There were banana slugs everywhere. I couldn't help thinking how much Mam would have enjoyed trying to count every one of them. I even saw a newt making its way across the trail. Apparently, it's the season for that.

There were surprisingly few people out on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. I think I ran into five...and one of them was a toddler, so make that 4.5. They were all friendly and happy. I chatted with several of them as we passed each other.

It's easy for me to pass the time thinking and walking. It was amazing that the fern-filled canyons were so deep and the autumn sun so low that hiking through them made me worry I was running out of daylight.

I wasn't. It was only mid-afternoon.

It was a great hike. There were tall stands of redwoods, sycamores dropping their leaves and spanish moss that glowed in the sunlight.

I made the entire loop in almost exactly four hours. Those people who write books? They walk awfully slowly, apparently! I was pretty disappointed to learn that my ankle still isn't 100 percent since being sprained on that trip to Alamere Falls. It was stiff and sore by the time I got back to the van.

But it was just 3 o'clock, giving me just enough time to visit a beach before heading back home. The coast itself was breezy and chilly, but I was reminded that I don't spend nearly enough time at the beach in the fall, even though I know it's one of the most beautiful times of the year along the Northern California coastline.

The beach was nearly deserted as well, so I hung out for a while, taking pictures, getting perfectly windblown and appreciating my time away, before making tracks towards home.

Spencer! Lucas! - San Diego 2012

Early July marked time for us to head down to San Diego for our annual visit to the Westbrook family. Despite their sibling-like squabbles, Smunch and Mam never seem to get enough of their cousins. It's nice to see because I'm never really done spending time with my sister (Aunt Karen!) either.

This year's theme? Water. Then again, given the opportunity. I think my kids would have a water theme every single day of the year. This time, they had to settle for every day of the trip instead. So Monday...

we went to the swimming pool shortly after arriving. Smunch and Mam showed off their comfort in the water.

Although, frankly, they can't compete with Spencer! for pure fearlessness. This kid is only six.

They stayed in the pool so long that Aunt Karen had to take Lucas! home for a nap.

Then there was this, at Santee Lakes:

More of the same at 4S Ranch, where I took no pictures. And this on our last day:

I don't know why the beach always seems to get saved 'til our last day. It's kind of a production to get out there, but I think the kids would be happy to be there all day every day. Somewhere in there, we also visited the Flying Leathernecks Aviation Museum at Miramar. Smunch said he didn't want to go, but wanted to stay the longest. Of course. Mam enjoyed it too, to my surprise.

I don't know why I find it so amusing to be corrected by my 10-year-old. "Do you want to go take a look at the tanks?" I asked. "Mom, those are tactical vehicles," he replied in exasperation. (shrug) Look like tanks to me, but what do I know?

Of course, July 4th was thrown in there too. We opted for a short trip to Poway during the day to check out their Independence Day activities. It was a quaint and fun way to spend a few hours after an awesome pancake breakfast at Aunt Karen's house. The park has an old-timey steam train that was up and running. Every other train ride included a mock gun-fight.

And every hour, they set off a canon, just for fun. There was live music, there were snow cones and watermelon and barbeque. The boys all took a ride on the train with Aunt Karen.

It was a long wait for the train and Mam wasn't up for that, so I took her for some watermelon and a long wait to have her face painted instead.

The trip was a great success. Everyone went back happy with their day, especially after some snow cones.

I'd hoped to get some tickets to watch San Diego's "Big Bay Boom" firework show from the deck of the USS Midway, but by the time we arrived in San Diego, the tickets were sold out. Just as well. San Diego's fireworks show was probably the biggest fiasco it'd ever been. It made national news, it was so catastrophic. At least no one was hurt.

Instead, we took the mellower route of watching fireworks local to Aunt Karen from a nearby elementary school. The kids played with (er, ehm) sparklers:

and played catch while they were waiting. There was plenty of room.

Maybe the show wasn't quite as spectacular as what folks should have seen from the deck of the Midway, but I suspect it was a lot more fun that what they actually saw.

And that made our holiday a success.

Many thanks to Uncle David for taking all four kids for an evening and letting Aunt Karen and me go out for a terrific dinner. We got to enjoy a rare, great conversation and for a change, almost got to feel like grownups!

Farewell to Prairie Creek

This was the longest camping trip our little family has ever taken. And for the first time, it really felt long enough. Unlike Lassen, there aren't loads of different things to do up in the Redwoods. There's pretty much hiking and...uh...hiking, sleeping, eating. Not that that isn't wonderful. We spent a lot of time driving around Lassen. We spent very little time driving this year. And that was great.

Friday, we drove back to Trillium Falls with the tripod and I took the pictures in the previous post. Then, we made good on our promise to Mam and drove out to the beach. The road along the coast is dirt and full of potholes. I couldn't quite imagine driving all the way to Fern Canyon. We stopped at Gold Bluffs Beach...about 4 miles short of the Fern Canyon parking lot...and I'd had quite enough of the road by then.We were some of the only people on the beach who weren't surf fishing. The fishermen (and women) seemed to be pretty successful. Mam collected bits of dead crabs from the beach, while Daddy and I sat and chatted. Fortunately, the sand is dark out there. It wasn't a super warm day, but we were warm enough sitting out there on our blankets, eating the lunch I'd packed before leaving.Mam was a lot happier to be at the beach than Smunch was. Already starved for information about his San Francisco Giants, Smunch got in a little baseball on the sand instead.As far as hiking went, it was a light morning, so after we left the beach and returned to the campground, we headed back out for one last set of trails before packing up to head home. This time, we chose the Rhododendron Trail. It sounded nice and it didn't disappoint.This hike was on the steep side compared to many of the others we'd taken. We chose to go down the "strenuous" South Fork trail rather than hiking up it. That was a good thing too. By the time we got to the top point on the Rhododendron trail, the kids were pooped.But the steep trail meant we were down and back to the van in no time.

Still no elk in the meadow near camp. So after dinner, I opted to go for a little drive, back to the spot where we'd seen elk a couple of days earlier, to see if I could find some bucks worthy of photographing. Nada. None on the drive there, none in the meadow there either. None on the way back...at least not until I exited the freeway on the way back to the park.

It looked like a couple of cars had crashed into each other at the bottom of the off ramp, but that wasn't the case. They'd just stopped quickly to take in the sights.There were five of these guys, grazing in the grass at the side of the ramp and later blocking the entire thing to traffic.

I took the kids back to see the elk when I got back, but the bucks were gone. Fortunately, there were a few out in Elk Meadow, so they still got to see some.

As soon as we got back to the campsite, Daddy and I set to packing everything we could, with our sights set on an early getaway the next morning. We hoped to stop near Eureka for breakfast at the Samoa Cookhouse, which had come highly recommended.

Everything worked out perfectly. We packed up the food and the tents and headed off.An hour to a yummy breakfast of French toast and eggs and then home.

Oh, how badly this trip was needed. And, as usual, as soon as we got home, I was back to leafing through the camping book, wondering where we might be able to go in August!