August 17th, a Monday
From Novato to Buellton (maybe)
Before the continental breakfast at the Day's Inn in Novato I popped up the street to see if I could find a geocache that no one else had found in a while. I didn't find it anywhere, including inside this guardrail.
Driving along the road through Inverness (a very CUTE little town!) we saw this dacha. I took the picture on the way back, though.
One of the main places I wanted to stop at up here was the KPH radio station location. Their driveway is rather impressive, and deserves several pics, maybe?
Cypress trees without dashboard.
The lighting looks a little different, but otherwise the same.
They all kinda look the same, though. Huh. You can see the white main building way down there.
Graffiti at the KPH parking lot.
We walked around a bit and looked at stuff. You might be bored.
Microwave dish aimed at the ground? Ha ha.
Antennas and feedlines.
LOTS of antennas and feed lines.
I hope you LIKE antennas and feed lines!
One of the places where lots of stuff goes in and out of the building, electrically.
I don't know what it is, but it is substantially built. That's about six feet of metal there. We need a banana for scale.
Now THIS, this is something I'm vaguely familiar with. My first job after high school, for a couple of weeks, was assisting in the manufacture of waveguide. Mostly the parts that went around corners. We filled the straight pieces with melted metal. After it cooled the head electrician bent the piece, the metal filled holding the interior shape. Then we heated the filling with a steam cleaner to melt it out.
By the way, that was the job where I learned about the amazing ability that nitric acid has to clean corrosion from pennies. Just make sure you test your gloves for pinhole leaks before you stick your gloved hands into a bucket of nitric acid!
Well, what do you know, more antennas! Maybe one BIG one?
Through the window, darkly, we see what may be the operating position.
I like electrical stuff. The ones on the right are larger than usual, house-wise, anyway. The ones on the left are HUGE!
Well, that just looks complicated.
Moss hanging from tree out front of the building.
Yup, more moss. You'd think I'd never seen moss in a tree before.
Last antenna picture!
Parking lot at Point Reyes Lighthouse. It's a hike up a paved road to the visitor center, etc.
Link to MOVie of fog racing over the parking lot.
Link to another MOVie of fog, but looking down at the ocean.
The hike up the access road to the visitor center/top of the stairs takes you past these windswept trees. Very pretty! And it was windy!
Yup, we rested at EVERY ONE of those "view points" on the way back up the stairs!
Proof of the pudding, the Point Reyes Lighthouse!
There are a bunch of cows around here. Here are only two pictures of them.
There are several ranches along the road, named "Ranch A" through "Ranch Z". More or less...
Lots of traffic as we head south on the 1, mostly, until we jump over to the 101.
A view of the Golden Gate Bridge from the Marin Headlands while we figure out the new toll structure and how to pay it. There's an old Nike missile base nearby, but we didn't know about it until after we got home.
Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.
What do you know, it's getting foggy as we pass over the bridge!
Before and after pics of a cache we found in Golden Gate Park.
As I found it.
Re-hid it "better than I found it", as we say.
Well, we drove through to Buellton, but "there was no room at the inn", at least no rooms with two beds. It was kinda late, around nine or so, after all. There was an Holiday Inn Express in Solvang for nearly twice the money, I talked Matt into staying there instead of driving straight through to San Diego. He needed the rest, AND he had been coming down with a cold for several days.
August 18th, a Tuesday
From Solvang to San Diego
The view out our window at the Holiday In Express in Solvang the next morning.
We went for a walk after the continental breakfast, a walk around Solvang, but first had to find the cache across the side street from the motel. Of course. Solvang is very pretty. I would like to have purchased some pastry, but, carbs. I would also have like to visit the Christmas store. Why are they not open at seven in the morning? Also, there were TONS of cars heading east, I assume to work somewhere, but where?
I needed a cache in Ventura county so we drove up the hill to Grant Park. I took these pictures of the "rock garden" to remember gardening ideas. After finding the cache.
The cache isn't in THOSE rocks, but here is a view of the Ventura area from the actual cache ground zero! How exciting!
Saw several people hiking and bicycling up and down to the top, but more people, like us, drove up.
That is about it for trip pics, except this last one. We ate this leftover pizza somewhere between Novato and Solvang, but I can't remember where. It is the World's Most Expensive Large Pizza, which we purchsed in Novato (the night before, for dinner) at Stefano's Solar Powered Pizza. I don't know how it added up to thirty bucks, maybe we got The Works, maybe it WAS an XL. It tasted fine, but just seems like a lot of money for "just" a pizza. The people working there were very helpful. They brought us a "doggie bag" without even being asked!
I'm SURE you will want to know how the geocaching added up. Here is the Counties Cached map before we left:
And here is the Counties Cached when I got ALMOST all the caches logged. One "Virtual" cache find in Angels Camp had not been approved by the cache owner yet (had to answer questions to prove we fount it. Since it is Virtual, there is no logbook to sign.), but has been since logged. Angels Camp is in Calaveras county.
And THAT is all for The Trip North!!
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I gotta put these somewhere! Library panoramas I took on August 24th, yesterday.
Thanks for reading!
