We had a wonderful new year’s evening with our friends who made home-made tempura vegetables, and soba noodle miso soup so good that it turns words into grunts.
Like most other places that are not in the Eastern time zone, California celebrates New Year’s eve twice, once with New York, at 9pm local time, and once at local midnight. Honestly, after the first one has been celebrated, the second one is anti-climactic, not even half as good. The benefit of feeling this way, is that you can go to sleep at a reasonable hour, without feeling like you’re missing out. Meh, it’s twelve o’clock somewhere.
After several phone calls to send our geographically dispersed family our well wishes, we went early to bed.
What a difference, a great sleep, and great company make.
The gale that came in the night blew away all the clouds, both literal, and metaphoric, and I woke with a fresh perspective. With the once again visible sun, a renewed hope.
We had a lazy Sunday morning, spoiled again by our friends with vegan pancakes and a tofu scramble as good as the last best one that we discovered last year, when we took our anniversary trip to Santa Barbara.
Although sunny, the forecast for the day was a continuing strong gale, then unstable for the following several days. Every time I checked the weather apps, and I checked them at least every thirty seconds, the forecast was different.
We’ll go to Catalina tomorrow. Well maybe we shouldn’t. Ok, we’re here to go sailing, so suck it up buttercup and go sailing. But we’ll be miserable. What, are you a fair weather sailor? There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. And so the internal dialogue went, for an exhausting several hours.
Ultimately, this unpredictability of the weather for the next several days, drove the decision for us that we should not go to Catalina. Better to be on shore wishing you were out there, than to be out there wishing you were on shore.
We could achieve eighty percent of why we drove here in the first place by going on a couple daysails. I can get my dose of salt spray medicine, but then we’ll also be able to return to the warm cocoon of our trailer, and be able to undo any temporary weather inflicted misery.
That, and given as tough as Lisa is, rather than being wet and miserable and stuck on the boat with no way to get warm for days, I’m sure she would push me into the sea herself, take the ferry back to Long Beach, and claim no prior knowledge of ever having a husband.
A couple daysails later this week it is.
In the afternoon we thanked our hosts for a wonderful night, though the extent of our gratitude was impossible to put into words, and made our way back up the Pacific Coast Highway to reunite with our trailer.
The park looked like it took a wet beating. The roads washed out completely with mud. I felt sorry for the tenters who braved the night’s weather events. It is my experience that tents normally leak at the seams just from a morning dew, and this was not that. This deluge tested more than one marriage last night, and I’m pretty sure not all of them survived.
High on the hill, our trailer, and site were unscathed by the carnage.
In the evening we went for a stroll down to the beach, to walk the dog, and watch a marvelous sunset above an ocean roiled by the ongoing double flag conditions. The swell sending plumes of spray each time it pushed itself into the high, rocky shoreline.
After the sunset, I made a fire at the camp site, while Lisa grilled some burgers.
I fell asleep, my skin and clothing smelling of campfire smoke, dreaming of camping as a kid.
Is this what we are now? Are we at camp permanently?
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