Giants

After an excellent breakfast comprised of last night's leftover pizza, we headed down to the beach.  With the day still young, we had a beautiful walk on the beach, where Alex, every the physical therapist, critiqued Arthur's gate pattern as documented by our sand tracks, and seagulls dodged the tide, searching for morsels brought in by the seas.  Judging from the crab exoskeletons left behind, the seagulls enjoy quite the diet.

We stopped back in Point Reyes to pick up some bakery good and coffee, then began a couple of hours driving through some beautiful country.  As the day started, we passed dairy cattle enjoying the early morning cool, and quietly passed into wine country.  Our next stop for the day was the Hopland Solar Living Center, a fascinating educational center for sustainable living and a natural habitat for hippies.

Ironically, immediately after hanging out with our more hippy brethren, we choice to dine at an In And Out burger joint.  After our experiences in Point Reyes and San Francisco, I started to believe all Californians must be environmentally conscious.  Up to this point, no one offered us straws.  We saw compost bins in city streets.  At the bakery in Point Reyes, the coffee stirrers consisted of thick strands of pasta.  Well, In And Out Burger hearkened us back to the more laissez faire attitudes we generally find ourselves in.

At last, we found ourselves nearing the draw of this vacation: the humongous redwoods.  My are they grand!  Scale just doesn't make sense in this world.  Imagine driving along pastureland and noticing that the cows were four times bigger than the largest cow you ever saw.  An animal that should hit you in the chest now looms over you 20 feet in the air.  That feeling you're imagining is what happens when you take any one object in a landscape and multiply it by orders of magnitude, and that's what these giants are.  All of a sudden, you are Alice in Wonderland, shrunk to the size of an insect.  The sensation, though I just described it, really isn't describable.

We took a short walk in the giant trees, understanding that our big hike was tomorrow.  There is no wind in a redwood forest; at any point the wind is blocked and dissipated by the trunks of trees 15 to 20 feet in diameter.  The silence is profound.  Redwood forests contain the greatest biomass per acre of any habitat in the world, more than the densest rain forest, yet all that mass is above you, there really isn't much undergrowth in these forests, and that allows you to see things around you really well.

I'm sure we'll talk more about the sensation later.  For now, we had to somewhat ruefully leave the enchanted forest behind for supper.  We were not rueful about leaving once we got to the Samao Cookhouse.  At this restaurant, you don't order, they just come out with course after wonderful course of delectable food.  We feasted on huge rolls, Parmesan chicken, and lemon cake.

It was quite a day for our industrious adventurers.  We headed to our Airbnb and drifted off to dreamland thinking about the wonders we had seen and the wonders to come.  Omnia Vincit Amour.