Hi everyone,
After a long drive from Monterey yesterday I’m back in Sonoma County today, at the home of my brother Tim and his wife Anne-Marie. It’s raining this morning, to the great relief of everyone. We hope this is the beginning of the end of a three-year drought. We shall see.
Here’s Tim and Anne-Marie on their front porch:
Article I’m correcting at the moment: Surface dynamics along the shores of Tunis Gulf (North-eastern Mediterranean Sea)
October 12 – 14th
I leave Malibu and drive up the coast stopping here and there to shop and work on my computer in a café. In the afternoon I settle in at Carpinteria State Park, but I take no pictures as my camera is no longer working. I’ll get that taken care of in Santa Barbara tomorrow. Carpinteria, though, is very pretty beach resort town. You can read about it and see pictures here and here.
In Santa Barbara the next day I get myself a new camera. I take only a few pictures in town, just to try out the camera…
…but Santa Barbara needs no publicity.
I make my way north again to El Capitan State Park and find a nice campsite…
…and I then rush to the beach to take some more pictures with my new camera.
I can’t help but notice the sorry condition of the stairs leading down to the beach…
…which leads me to say that our state parks in California are generally in a sorry condition: underfunded, defunded, unfunded…
But the beach is beautiful, both to the south…
…and to the north:
I take a lot of pictures of the beachlife, both terrestrial…
…and aquatic, though I suspect this specimen no longer qualifies as “life”:
I like the shadows they produce in the late afternoon light.
Especially this one:
That evening I take some pictures from the bluff above the beach:
Those specks you can just barely make out in the distance, they’re offshore drilling platforms:
A platform, with the zoom:
The sky is grey this evening. The forecast for tomorrow is grey and cooler. Autumn is coming.
The next day I take a long walk a few miles along the coast to the next state park, El Refugio:
It doesn’t look bad from here, but when I walk around the campground I see that it, too, is rather run down. The palm trees give it a nice appearence from this bluff.
The day is grey but warm…
The Pacific Ocean is a great swimming hole:
I take an interest in the plant life along the way. I’ve seen this one many a time, but I still don’t know what it’s called:
This one is new to me:
I’ve been told by Captain that these are called “prickly poppies”, though I called them “datura” in another blogpost. I’ll have to look them up again. It seems to me that I found the name “datura” either online or in a book that I bought about Zion Park. Maybe someone else out there can help me?
And of course there are the palm trees, starting to be less numerous along this part of the coast:
I haven’t had much success as a wildlife photographer on this trip. I long ago gave up on the ubiquitous deer and squirrels. But his pelican is too good to pass up. I decide to approach step by step, to see just how close I can get. Not too close yet…
Closer…
…closer still…
…the closest I’ll ever get. The seagull has already taken flight…
And then I take one step too many: