Some Catch-Up, With Singing In The Background

Ok, so the singing isn't audible to you, but I'm being serenaded by "It's A Small World" at the top of Darcy's lungs as she tries to keep herself awake instead of taking a nap. It's mostly cute, but she's really LOUD!

So here are some belated pictures of our move and few week in Crescent City. Despite all our warnings about our narrow, sandy, rutted dirt road, the moving company sent pretty much the biggest truck they could (and not because we had so much stuff, either; we filled less than a third of the truck). The driver was a champion, getting the truck over the cattle crossing at the top of our road and backing it down to our gate, but there it stopped.

To get our stuff onto the truck, they loaded it onto a pick up truck and drove it around the house and the backed down our "driveway" to the waiting semi. It was an interesting experience. The driver was telling tall tales about it to the local movers who unpacked the truck at this end. "Oh, you haven't seen anything...you should have seen where they moved from..."

Our couch, going for a precarious ride on top of boxes.

About half-way through the process, we conceded (as we had thought earlier) that Darcy wasn't going to make it for a whole day of moving. Because we were driving both cars to Crescent City, we could and did leave around nap time to check into the hotel in Barstow for the night. She was supposed to nap, but that didn't happen, so as we approached Barstow, I decided that we just couldn't leave without finally visiting the Calico Early Man Site. For those of you who haven't read textbooks about American archaeology, the Calico site is somewhat infamous for getting incredible attention on an international level on very skimpy evidence. In the late 1960s (I think), Louis Leakey was convinced that stone "tools" found at the site were 200,000 years old. He visited the site and was officially the director of excavation until his death. Almost nobody else believes it, but the guide at the one-room visitor center still claims it, as does their brochure, which states that the site was probably occupied by late Homo erectus or Neanderthals, take your pick.

Apparently, they manage to keep excavations going. I think it's mostly donations at this point, coming from true believers. The guide was perhaps the worst I've ever encountered at a Visitor Center. It was as if I tripped a switch as I crossed the threshold and turned on a tape recorder. It didn't matter what answers I gave to his rhetorical questions. It didn't matter when I moved to a new display case. It didn't even matter when Darcy walked back out the door and I stepped into the doorway to keep her in sight. He just kept talking, giving a spiel he's clearly given hundreds, if not thousands of times.

Darcy, with "Camp Leakey" in the background.

It made for a very interesting start to our trip. Of course, it also gave Darcy just enough time to become exhausted, so that she fell asleep less than five minutes before we reached the hotel. So I read a book in the car for over an hour in the parking lot before checking in and watched storm clouds roll in that had pummeled the coast a day earlier, but that never quite managed to rain there.