Happy Birthday, Auntie Best!

Here's our very best attempt of making your birthday a very, very shiny one:

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.

Sorry For The Lack Of Photos

I'm feeling a little lazy, so I'm not getting you a picture for this one, but I thought I'd give an update on our life in Crescent City so far. This is our fourth night in the house and it's getting pretty close to being unpacked and semi-organized. Mostly, we're as far as we are in that process because we appear to be missing the shelves for one piece of furniture and we're trying to get through every box to find them. I actually cooked in the kitchen today and hope to have an actual MEAL produced in it tomorrow!

But here's the real news:

On Friday, one of Michael's coworkers invited us over for dinner to give us a break from unpacking. We walked over to their house around six. You read that right. We walked to a neighbor's house. We have neighbors. Who live close enough to our house that we can walk to their house. It's revolutionary. Not only that, but they also invited another coworker as well and she walked, too, and we walked home TOGETHER after dinner because also she lives so close.

Now, you might think that story is over, but no. There's more. On Saturday, we went to the second-to-last farmers' market of the year. We bumped into our neighbors. At the farmers' market that's a five minute drive from our house.

And as if that's not enough? Our house is about 150 feet from the complex's play area. Darcy played with random kids over there this afternoon. After that, we were all back in the garage trying to find those dang shelves and Darcy spied a little girl riding in a little car toy across the street and asked to go meet her. So we did, and ended up visiting with Safira and her mother, Mary, for fifteen or twenty minutes. Darcy let Safira play with the octopus she had been playing with and Safira let Darcy take a few turns in her little car.

We live in an actual town. It's amazing.

And on the natural side of life, today was a gorgeous sunny day and we hiked down a bluff to get our first glimpse of the tide pools. Unfortunately, we tried to squeeze too much into our morning and got there a little after low tide, so the pools were getting covered back up when we reached them. But we did get to see a lot of itty bitty mussels, lots of barnacles, and star fish and anemones from a distance. We'll go back soon. This time, we'll get there well before low tide.

Tomorrow, Michael has his first full day at work and the forecast says there's a 100% chance of rain. So we won't be going to the tide pools tomorrow. But we might be going to a group toddler activity at the Family Resource Center (or something like that). They have activities with music, reading, and dance pretty much every day. I can't remember which activity happens tomorrow, but something does.

They also help fund the WonderBus which is part bookmobile and part something else with toys. What I hope Darcy will end up loving is that they have kids keep reading logs: In order to add a book to their list, the kids have to "read" the books to the rabbit who lives on the WonderBus. We visited it at the farmers' market and the woman who runs the bus spied the chard in our bag. She asked if Darcy wanted to feed some to the rabbit because it's Tiger Lily's favorite food. She seemed to think we were doing her a favor by giving up some of our chard to her rabbit, but Darcy was so thrilled by being allowed to feed the rabbit that I thought we were the recipients of the favor.

To sum up: Life is good in Crescent City so far.

Crescent City Has Big Trees

I suspect you all knew that, but if Blogger cooperates today, I have pictures to prove it! I tried to post these pictures from our trip to the Stout Grove in Jedediah Smith State Park yesterday, but Blogger refused. Not friendly at all. Anyway, these pictures were taken about a 10 or 12 minute drive from our hotel. Here's a cluster of redwoods with our car for scale:


And here's an uprooted redwood with an insane amount of biomass living all over it. There's nothing here for scale, but it's probably at least twice as tall as our car. I was really impressed by the downed trees in general. Whole trees grow on fallen trunks and stumps. And everything is so green! And so many different shades of green!

We are anxiously awaiting our stuff, which is supposed to arrive first thing tomorrow morning. My minimum goal is to have our bed and Darcy's whole bedroom put together in time for a more or less normal bedtime tomorrow night. (And remember, if you click on any photo on this blog, you'll get a bigger version of it.)

We Made It!

We are officially in Crescent City! We haven't seen the inside of our house yet, but we should see it in about twelve hours. In the meantime, I'm too exhausted to pick good pictures of the journey to Crescent City, but here's our girl celebrating her first run/dance on the beach in Crescent City. Other beaches were great, too, but this is the beach she's been waiting for and she took full enjoyment of her first visit. Michael is looking for fun things to show her, none of which really got her attention. Not even the four horses that galloped by us.

Our trip here was mostly uneventful. We had a minor brake failure while in Yosemite which meant that I drove the flattest route out of the mountains to Merced to get them fixed (rotors and pads on both front brakes, but the rear were still fine; that's why it was a minor brake failure and not a complete disaster). The fix went pretty smoothly and I was able to meet up with Michael and Darcy in Stockton that night more or less as planned.

I'll get up some more pictures soon, but we had a beautiful drive up here. Some of the most spectacular scenery will not be represented, however, because there weren't any good places to stop for pictures. We took a lot of very windy, hilly roads between Stockton and Eureka, our last two nights on the road. They were a little tiring to drive, but worth every extra minute and mile.

We're now awaiting our furniture, which should arrive in four or five days. I'll feel better about everything once we see the inside of our house, but Crescent City seems like a nice, small town. It has a lot of hotels and restaurants (including a lot of chains) because of the tourist trade, but also seems to have good municipal services and a range of stores. There are a lot of empty store fronts, too, but I suspect that many small towns do now.

It is more remote than I thought because I did not appreciate what Highway 101 looks like up here. It has frequent sections of single-lane-in-each-direction and many, many twists and turns and ups and downs. It's a little more hilly and curvy than where I learned to drive, but not so much that it's uncomfortable to drive. It does mean that the miles to other, larger towns will not go quite as quickly as the miles between Cima and Las Vegas. These are not 70 MPH posted speed limit roads.

Lucky for us, most of the services we'll need are in town. And tomorrow, we'll start exploring them!

A Belated Birthday Present For John

John, because you're so far away, we couldn't really send you anything but our best wishes for your birthday. But then we went to Vegas Sunday to return library books and get Darcy out among people after being cooped up for most of the week with a cold. She gets to choose the park if we go to town without too many errands and this time, she chose the "cake shop park", which is a small, but very nice playground in the middle of an outdoor mall that pretends to be a town center.

Along with a few cute buildings with kitchens, a cake shop, and other furnished rooms, it has a astroturf-walled maze, and a splash pad. The municipal parks in Las Vegas all turn their splash pads off at the end of September and I assumed this one would be off, too. It was when we first got there. And then, it wasn't. I usually have a back-up outfit for Darcy when we go to town, so we didn't fight too hard when she made a bee-line for the water. She had a lot of fun and got SOAKED. But that's not your present, John. I'm just stalling for dramatic purposes. The playground is near the (also astro-turfed) town square where they have live music and other events. Yesterday morning, the event led us to think of a new career path for you.

Whenever you've talked about yoga, the first thing that stands right out is just how darn competitive yoga is. You're always talking about trying to out-yoga all the other yoga-people you know. (Or wait ... is it that I've never heard you talk about yoga as competition?? That would really kill this whole gift-idea.)

The event taking place was the Nevada Regional competition for the USA Yoga Championships. Yes! It was competitive yoga! Yoga as an athletic sport, brought to you by the people who are petitioning for yoga to be added to the Olympics in 2016. So we figured that if the whole travel-the-world-teaching-yoga business dries up, maybe you could start competing to represent our nation at the Olympics. I guess there must not be any prize money involved if they're calling it an amateur sport, but otherwise, I was thinking that it could finance your travels for a while, too.

The people under the red tent were the judges. Each competitor had to do a set series of poses following their introduction. In between the men's and women's competition they had a yoga fashion show. It was all very commercial; again, just what I think of when you talk about your yoga experiences.

According to their rules, you apparently have to do yoga half-naked, which I've never noticed you doing in the photos of your classes. In fact, the more I think about it, maybe this isn't the perfect career for you after all. I guess I'm going to lose the "which sister-in-law got you the best birthday present" competition, huh?





(Too bad, 'cause from what I saw, you could kick their tushies. Then I could brag that my brother-in-law was the USA yoga champion!)

Retrospective, Part IV (The Final Installment)

Here it is, the final installment of the Darcy Retrospective. These stray from the preserve a bit more than the last. My next series will be strictly of the preserve as we get closer to our move date, but enjoy these snaps of our girl in the meantime...

Darcy hides in a rockshelter in Quail Basin.

There were two of these cute snaps from the rehearsal dinner. Now you get the other one.

You didn't think you'd get out of this retrospective without Orville, did you?

Darcy and Liana show off Thomas-themed tattoos in North Carolina.

Darcy and Michael climb more rocks on the edge of the Granite Mountains.

Darcy rides the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland.

Darcy's first baseball game, complete with first Cracker Jacks.