This is starting out as a candlelight blog post. I’m writing this on Monday night at my Dad’s house. A freak power outage caused by a transformer failure has left the house without power. The power company is outside working on the problem, but there is no resolution yet. [Power returned at 3 AM] Needless to say there is no internet access at the moment.

Our day began in San Francisco. Our motel was near the intersection of Lombard and Van Ness. We began the day walking up Lombard to see the famous Lombard Street curves. We approached the landmark from its backside. Getting to the top, we realized that the best photo-op was from the bottom, below us. We weren’t really up for walking down that side and then having to walk back up again, so off to breakfast we went. Dave calculated that he had traveled 18,022 miles in the 17 days since he left Purdue and then returned there. [He got back to West Lafayette mid-day on Tuesday] This calculates out to an average speed of 44 MPH over those 17 days. After breakfast, we dropped Dave off at the San Francisco airport. He needed the miles. We took the road to Half Moon Bay. From there we spent our day traveling down Route 1 to Monterey.

Our first stop was at Pigeon Point Lighthouse. It is a nice old lighthouse, but it is in need of some restoration. The Fresnel lens was huge. Next stop was Ano Nuevo State Park, the home of elephant seals. We saw several hundred seals lying around on the beach, or frolicking in the surf. We passed by the beach at Big Basin State Park. There were dozens of para-surfers and windsurfers out on the water, along with some passing pelicans. We got back to Monterey in time for dinner. We met Dad and Chris at Fi-Fi’s Bistro. The sand dabs were very good. Afterwards, back at the house we enjoyed the light from a gorgeous sunset and then a candlelight conversation. I began this post then. I plan on posting this from home, so if you are reading this, you can assume that we safely made it back home. [Vegas had free wi-fi, so I posted from there.]