West Coast Time

So, the point of this whole thing is to keep my family and friends informed about my adventures in life. Mostly, my dad doesn't know how to use facebook, and my mom doesn't know how to use a computer, so the idea is that my dad will dial up the web page, and he'll leave the computer on so my mom can read it before she goes to work.

That's the hope, at least.

Currently, I am living in Menlo Park, California, on furlough from Columbus, Ohio, and working at the very excellent Stanford Institute of Theoretical Physics. There will be, I'm sure, posts in the future about the beautiful Stanford campus, the charming downtown Palo Alto, and the mountain biking in the Santa Cruz mountains. Eventually.

But no, this weekend I am in Monterey, California, with my girlfriend for a short vacation. "Weekend" and "short" are very subjective terms in academia, one quickly finds out.

We left Menlo Park today at about 3 PM, and headed down California Highway 1, with the Santa Cruz mountains to our left and the Pacific Ocean to our right. I'm a sucker for salt water, and we had to stop and take some pictures about an hour into the trip.

The Pacific Coast is much different to what I'm used to---of course, we don't have any mountains in Texas (excepting, of course, the Davis Mountains out west), much less a rocky coast line. The vistas were breathtaking, to say the least.

We did see some very lazy sea lions, just sleeping on a rocky island just off the coast. They were doing what (I imagine) sea lions do best---that is, turning sardines into blubber and sea lion shit. This is, of course, their prerogative, but I would have liked to see them catch a fish or balance a ball or SOMEthing.

There was also this very tolerant seagull:

The bird aficionados will be quick to point out that this is actually some sort of albatros or something, and I'm just too lazy to look it up on wikipedia, and it looks more or less the same as the seagulls which live in Texas.

We are spending our weekend in the Centrella Inn Bed and Breakfast, located in the city of Pacific Grove, CA. We had dinner at a seafood place on Monterey Bay tonight, and watched the sun set over the Pacific. (Well, that's not exactly true. We would have seen a spectacular sunset, had we not stopped to take pictures of albatrosses and sea lions. But that's ok.) I had some halibut which was tragically overcooked, which kind of pisses me off. I had probably some of the better cooked fish that I've ever had in Columbus a few weeks ago (again, halibut), and I come to Monterey and get a piece of fish that's overcooked? Inexcusable.

Tomorrow Bryanne and I will go whale watching in Monterey Bay. She doesn't know this, of course, but I imagine that she'll have a great time, nonetheless. I went whale watching once off Montauk Point with my uncle Peter, but there were no whales to be seen---only some Yellowfin Tuna schooling. The rumor is that there exist "friendly" humpback whales, which like to circle the whale watching boat and check out the whale watchers. This is probably some figment of a whale watching advertising geek's imagination, but one can always hope. Other than humpbacks, we can hope to see blue whales (the big ones) and killer whales. There are occaisonal spottings of things like sperm whales and blue sharks, too. But, at the very least, there will be seals, otters and dolphins galore.

Satudrday will be spent at the heralded Monterey Bay Aquarium. This is great, because both Bryanne and I love aquariums. Pictures will, of course, follow.

I'll leave you with some nice plants which we found along Highway 1. They look particularly hardy, which is a function of the climate here, I'm sure. Either way, the flowers were pretty nice: