More trip notes

After wine country, we headed up to the Mendocino Coast to gather with the clan on my father's side in honor of my grandmother's 85th birthday. We did a similar thing on the Oregon coast five years ago. Serge and I picked up the keys for our house and went over to open up. We had rented two houses about 5 minutes apart. I was in the smoker's house (everyone did their thing outside though) and had a couple urges, but I made it through pretty easily.

Our house is just out of frame on the right. There were very rough seas and high winds the first couple days up there and the sea was mesmerizing.

The light of this lighthouse shone in our window. It was about 3 inlets down the coast from our house. Here, it's this one.

One day as I was going down the little road to our house, I passed these guys. It took a moment for my brain to register, "Hey wait, were they real?" So I stopped the car and backed up and took a picture of their frozenness. The camera sound scared them and then they bolted.

Here's me and the guest of honor for the week. She is my only living grandparent and to quote my 12 year old cousin AJ, even though she says she doesn't want to live to a hundred, I hope she does.

Serge and I down at the tidepools.

Here's a sort of funny thing that happened the second day there. My cousin AJ asked for a piggyback ride while we were visiting the cutsie little town of Mendocino. I told him that if he wanted a ride, he'd have to ride on my shoulders. He was game and hopped on up. Then I started to fake that I was losing my balance and saying "Whoa, whoa, whoa," to scare him a little and he was laughing so I kept it up and lurched forward. Only that time he didn't lean back, he leaned forward with me and that was it, we were going down. So many things run through your mind at that point. Mostly, I didn't want AJ to get hurt, I mean his mom was right there and she'd kill me if I cracked her kid's head open. I fell squarely on my knees and wrists and he tumbled off after I broke the fall. I decided I'm not going to do that anymore!

Okay one last funny thing. On the first day my aunt just had to play me a recording she had taken with her cell phone. She was absolutely giddy about it and played if for my dad too. It was of a particularly noisy dump in the bathroom that she had taken. Yeah, that's my blood right there.