John: Having successfully sprung our parents from their usual lives, we took a couple of days to relax at the beach.

Monday, our focal activity was to spend time with Chris and Mark Landgreen, friends from way back. How far back?

1. 1960s: Mark and I played basketball for opposing teams in the same high school league during the same years (he was better);
2. 1970s: Chris, Pat, and I taught at the same school in Pasadena;
3. 1970s: Around the same time we lived across the street from each other;
4. 1970s: In the middle of the 70s, Mark and Chris moved to Eugene while Pat and I lived there;
5. 1983: We stayed with the Landgreens when Hurricane Alicia lashed their neighborhood outside Houston; and
6. 2003: We had last visited with the Landgreens during our cross-country trip when we drove Jack's T-bird from Pasadena to C'ville.

We arranged to meet the Landgreens at Avila Beach about mid-afternoon. After hanging at the beach, looking at old photos, we drove to SLO for an early dinner at NOLO. Swapping experiences and observations with Mark and Chris is always easy and worthwhile.

We took a brief wine tour on Tuesday. Earlier in the week I called our friend Spencer Graham for advice about the wines of the neighborhood. Spencer, who once cooked wonderful food at the C&O and then sold wine wholesale, now makes the fine Elizabeth Spencer wines. He had a couple of recommendations, so we drove 15 mins to the east and found the Edna Valley neighborhood. We---well, I---tasted a few wines at Bailyana and Talley (select image at the right for a larger view) and snagged some ready-now sauvignon blancs and some hold-for-later pinot noirs. Good fun, in my estimation.

As noted previously, we failed to bring a bird book with us (other than the wonderful Identify Yourself that I got for a gift recently and didn't have a chance to read while on the trip), so birding was primarily an act of looking, enjoying, and wondering. We saw lots of familiar birds and some that were new or seen not-so-recently. There were gulls of various stripe (including many unfledge juveniles), pelicans, cormorants, doves, jays, mockers, sparrows, and etc. A couple of notable birds:

• Pigeon Guillemot
• Black Oystercatcher (Pat called "oystercatcher" on site with no book)

I took many images of birds, many when there were shore birds sitting on rocks at a distance. They are a little like the typical tourist images in which the objects in the distance are so small that one wishes for a telephoto lense more powerful than one has. Of course, I could have enlarged them substantially, but then I would have simply been showing my inadequate skills in focusing.

I spent a lot of time waiting for a pelican to fly close enough that I could get a closeup of one in flight. It was simply an effort to develop greater facilty with my new camera. I figured that if monkey could probabilistically be expected to type an encyclopedia or dictionary, I could take sufficient photos to get at least one good one. Mostly I failed. So far, I am still amassing sufficient photos, but the best I have to show for my effort to date is this one.

Unlike many of our trips, dining was not focal activity for this vacation. We had about one good dish---a tuna appetizer at Steamers in Pismo Beach---and lots of pretty ordinary food.