Wind, Rocks, Water

January 7, 2012
We start the day with the Creekside Inn’s complimentary continental breakfast--tasty Italian pastries fresh from the bakery down the street, served with a smile and some great travel tips by the owner who checked us in last night.  This is why we love old style family owned motor court motels—timeless treasures of personal care and service.

 We take Highway 1 up the coast to Carmel, squiggling up and down the sides of Santa Lucia mountains that crowd the coast most of the way.  It takes us eight hours to travel seventy miles, because we can’t resist a scenic view turn-out, and there are many along this stretch of Highway 1, popularly acclaimed as one of the ten most scenic drives in America.

(That's the famous Bixby Bridge in the background.  One of the most photographed bridges in America, it was built in 1932, and has appeared in many movies and car commercials since then.)

Here are some highlights of the drive:

 First we revisit our elephant seals, but you already saw them, so no more pictures.   I was worried about the pup that couldn’t figure out how to nurse yesterday, but when I tried to find him today, I realized that the elephant seal females and pups look so similar that I couldn’t identify the pup and his mom in the crowd.

Here is our zen question of the day:  Why are we drawn to scenes where rock, wind and water converge? 

Gas is $5.30 a gallon at Ragged Point, but the views from the trails around the property make it almost worth the investment.

Ragged Point view

At Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park we hike to this waterfall, which is the only major waterfall on the coast that pours into the ocean.

We lunch cliffside 300 feet above the ocean at Lucia Lodge, which was established in 1930, and is still being run by descendents of the founders.   This is our lunchtime view.

Many people consider Point Lobos State Preserve to be the best state park in California.  We hike around an ancient Monterey Cypress grove and enjoy great coastal views—more rocks, water and wind.

(The rangers assured us that the rusty red growths on the oceanside trees are a form of algae that does not harm the tree--they have a symbiotic relationship.)

We end our day at the Sandpiper Inn, a charming Carmel bed and breakfast so near the ocean that the sound of waves breaking on the shore lulls us to sleep.  We feel like we are in a medieval castle with raw wood rafters above us lit by the flickering flames of the fireplace.

California Zen

Friday, January 6, 2011

We begin the day with a visit to Morro Rock, the volcanic peak focal point of Morro Bay.  I watch birds, Dick watches waves pounding and frothing on the rocky shore, and we both agree we could stay here for hours more, but we have to get breakfast and drive on to the Hearst Castle, today’s main event.   

We find a little breakfast spot on the waterfront with a Morro Rock view, then head north. 

Now the zen phase of our day begins.  We realize that our experiences are falling into a pattern of balance and harmony, when we chance upon the perfect counterpoint to Hearst Castle along the way. 

This is Nitt Witt Ridge, a rambling folk art estate built high on a hill using recycled materials.  It took 51 years to reach this stage of completion.

This is the Hearst Mansion, a rambling castle built high on a hill using materials recycled from many European cathedrals, castles and estates.  It took 28 years to reach this stage of completion, and it is far from finished.

See what we mean—two parallel universes, ridiculous and sublime, viewed back to back.  Zen!

Hearst Castle is worthy of a closer look, so here are a couple more glimpses of grandeur:

William Randolph Hearst owned 250 square miles of land around the Castle, where he maintained one of the country’s largest cattle ranches.  Hearst cattle still graze in fields around the castle, but the ranch area has shrunk considerably.  The family donated thirteen miles of shoreline for state parks, for example.  Which brings us to another zen moment.

 After our tour of Hearst Castle, we stop just a few miles up the road at a state beach covered with over a thousand grunting, bellowing, squealing elephant seals. These huge creatures—males weigh up to 5,000 pounds and females up to 1,500—return to this beach every year, just as the delicate butterflies we saw yesterday return to their eucalyptus grove.  And, just like the butterflies, their life story is an amazing one.

The female seals come to the beach to give birth, and when their babies are born (no multiple births—you will see why as you read the rest of the story), they weigh sixty to eighty pounds.  The mothers stay with their babies on shore, nursing them for about a month.  In that time the pups gain weight fast—they weigh 300 pounds by the end of the month.  The mothers then abandon their pups and head back to sea—they are hungry, since they have not eaten since they gave birth, and they have been nursing for a month.  But before heading to sea, they mate with one of the males on shore.  The way things work out, the peak of mating activity is right around Valentine’s Day—go figure!

Meanwhile, the pups are on their own to learn how to swim, and they figure it out by about the age of 2 ½ months, which is a good thing, because they have to eat, and the only way to get their food is to swim for it.  At four months they have to be strong enough swimmers to migrate to Alaska, and then they will be back around here next year, hanging out with their pod, which numbers about 17,000 now (at any given time, only a small fraction of the group is on the beach).

It is cold and windy on the observation boardwalk, but it is hard to tear ourselves away from the drama of the seals below.  One mother had given birth at noon, and the pup still has not found her nipple four hours later.  The juvenile males are engaged in wrestling matches.  Gulls are gathering around a female who is sounding pretty uncomfortable and frantically flipping sand on her back—all signs that she might give birth soon.  Should we wait around to see it? 

 We leave, but we don’t go far--we find a great little family run hotel nearby, and we will go back to visit the seals again tomorrow.  

A California Sampler

Thursday, January 5, 2012

We begin the day with a very hearty breakfast at the Cajun Kitchen, voted “Best Breakfast” in Santa Barbara for the past ten years (jambalaya with two poached eggs on top—can’t beat it).  

Then we head to the harbor for a quick check of the local waterfront.  Dick is surprised to see the UC Santa Barbara Stadium right across the street from the harbor marina.  The sight instantly catapults him back to 1960, when he was pole vaulting in a track meet there--three world record holders competed, and the first 16 foot outdoor pole vault was achieved (unfortunately, not by Dick).  It was a propitious day in track and field history.

On the road heading north again, our next stop is Solvang, a community settled in 1911 by Danish Americans.  After the town was featured in Life magazine in 1947, tourists began visiting, and the townspeople started remaking the place as a pseudo-Danish village, to give the tourists more of what they came for.  Today, it is a very picturesque caricature of a Danish village. 

We stop there long enough to sample the local culinary specialty—aebleskiver.  Best described at a pancake shaped like a tennis ball, the aebleskiver is served with a syrup of warmed raspberry jelly and dusted with powdered sugar.  It tastes a lot like a jelly donut, but the folks in Solvang are quick to say that it is much healthier than a donut, since it is not fried, but cooked in a stovetop mold. 

Just a couple miles north of town we stop by Quicksilver Ranch, a miniature horse farm.  After seeing the miniature horses in the Rose Parade, we are interested in learning more about them.  A ranch staffer tells us that the 65 miniature horses grazing in the fields at this farm are the same breed as the ones in the parade—they just look different because the horses on the ranch are in their natural shaggy winter coats, and the ones in the parade have been shorn to look pretty. (The maximum height for a miniature horse is thirty inches at the base of the mane—they are very cute).

Quicksilver Ranch Miniature Horses

Rose Parade Miniature Horses

Kitty corner across the street from the horse farm is Rideau Winery, one of the ninety wineries in the Santa Ynez valley that offer wine tastings. The reason why there are so many wineries in the valley is that the coastal mountains here run east to west, funneling cool Pacific Ocean air inland in the late afternoon and evening.  Hot sunny days + cool evenings = a winning combination for wine grapes.  We sample seven Rideau wines, and are once again on our way along the road lined with miles and miles of naked grape vines.  They don’t look like much when all the leaves and grapes are gone and they are trimmed back for the winter.

Rideau Winery

Our next stop is a eucalyptus grove in Pismo Beach that is home to the largest overwintering colony of monarch butterflies in the United States. The butterflies hang high above us in tight clumps with wings tucked to share their body heat.  They are the fourth or fifth generation descendents of the butterflies who spent the winter in this grove last year, and they have traveled up to 1,000 miles to get here, flying up to 100 miles in a single day.  How do they find their way?  They must have senses that are beyond our comprehension. Fragrant with eucalyptus and buoyant with a fluttery butterfly energy, this peaceful grove feels like a shrine to a small miracle of nature.  We visit with respect and awe.   

From Malibu to the Mission

From Malibu to the Mission

Wednesday, January 4, 2011

On New Year’s Day I saw my Malibu Barbie at LACMA (blond ponytail, electric blue eye shadow,  a strapless black and white stripe bathing suit and cat eye sunglasses—I’d recognize her anywhere).  I learned that my childhood toys are now old enough to be museum-worthy, and realized that I was just days away from seeing the iconic beach of Barbie, Gidget, and the Beach Boys--groovy! 

Today is the big day.  We are back on the road, and living by our Vagabond rules—drive the scenic routes and avoid chain hotels and restaurants (except Starbucks).  We are hugging the coast from LA to Santa Barbara, and the first stop is Malibu, where surfers are riding the waves at every beach, even though the water seems pretty tranquil today. 

 Houses are perched precariously cliffside in the narrow strip between Route 1 and the ocean,  and movie star mansions are perched on the hillsides above.  

The road eventually turns inland, and bisects strawberry fields stretching forever in Oxnard.

It takes us all morning to drive from LA to Santa Barbara—a distance of sixty miles.  We are back in our traveling groove of life in the slow lane. 

After lunch on the patio of a local hamburger joint, we head to the Old Mission Santa Barbara. Founded in 1786, it is the “longest continuous presence of Franciscans in the United States.”  The current church there dates to 1820, because an 1812 earthquake destroyed the original one.

As is so often the case in our travels to historic destinations, we are appalled by some of the history lessons we learn at the mission, which had the goal of converting the native Chumash Indians to Christianity.  The mission sowed the seeds of its own downfall when the missionaries (1)treated the native people as children (based on their belief in their own mental and spiritual superiority) and (2)transmitted deadly diseases to them.  

In addition to its historic significance, the Old Mission is a photographer’s paradise.  Our archive of photos from this trip grows and grows, while we spend far longer than the average visitor wandering about the mission and its tranquil gardens and grounds.  

We are staying in a gem of a hotel, The Presidio.  It is a funkily updated 1950s era Motor Court, with rooms that are all eclectically decorated with individually designed vinyl decal murals, so each has a very different personality.  Is it karma or what—this is our room—roses, roses, roses! 

The hotel was highlighted in a recent New York Times “36 Hours” feature on Santa Barbara (along with the considerably more upscale Four Seasons, with doubles starting at $425).  We feel proud of ourselves for actually remembering to pack the article and for making a reservation a day ahead of time to be sure we could get a room.

We round out our afternoon in Santa Barbara with a walk from our hotel through the historic district to the Spanish Moorish Palace style courthouse, where we have a bird’s eye view of the town from the observation deck at the top of the clock tower. 

The 1929 vintage courthouse is adorned with beautiful hand-painted tiles everywhere we look—walls, benches, floors, stairs, elevator doors, even the ceiling, which is so high and dark that photography is impossible.

I imagine that somewhere in all my many many tile pictures lie the inspirations for future quilts.

After the sun goes down, we dine on tapas, sitting at a sidewalk table warmed by a little fireplace and an overhead heater.  As we share a dessert of molten chocolate cake with raspberry sauce and both ice cream and whipped cream, we think that we have had a better day than the New York Times “36 Hours” people ever dreamed of.

Roses Redux and the Wonderful Weisman Collection

January 3, 2011

Up at 4:45 again today for a closer look at the Rose Parade floats. . . . Our buses leave for Pasadena at 6:15 again today, because at 7 a.m. the gates to the float viewing area are open just for elderly and disabled folk--so they can get a close look at the floats, then leave before they are trampled and stampeded by the general public arriving at 10 a.m..

 

We are amazed by how quickly three hours flies by.  We could have spent twice that long examining and admiring at all the intricate details of float workmanship—exquisite artistry that lasts just a few days before it becomes potpourri (sold to benefit charities), trash and recycled materials.  Even today, some of the flowers on the floats are already wilting and droopy, after spending all of yesterday in the piercing sun and warm temperatures. 

After looking at the surfing dog float from ground level, rather than from bleachers above, we have to admit that the artistry of the undersea murals along the sides of the float is really quite wonderful.  We won’t take back our assessment from yesterday, but at least we can understand how the judges might have come to their decision to give it the Extraordinaire Trophy.

Here are a few more views of the floats up close.  (We have over 500 float pictures between yesterday and today, so this is a just the tiniest sample of our vast archive.)

As we are rushing back to the bus, passing the floats for the last time, we hear a woman ask the classic question while looking at a finely wrought float element--"What is it made of?"  Her friend's response--"I don't care--it's made of magic." 

Well said, and a fine close to our Rose Parade adventure.

Our Road Scholar program is over as soon as the bus drops us back at our hotel, but we have booked an extra night there so that we can visit LA’s secret art museum, the Frederick Weisman Art Foundation.  The museum is in the Weisman home on a residential street in an exclusive neighborhood, where most of the homes are, like the Weismans’, hidden behind tall walls or hedges, protected by remote controlled gates.  The museum is open on weekdays by appointment only for tours at 10:30 and 2:00.  Our 2 p.m. tour had twenty people, which was more than our docent had ever led before.  When our friends Mona and David visited, they were the only ones on their tour. 

The purpose of the museum is to encourage people to live with art, which is why the paintings are not hanging in a museum with labels, but instead remain in the Weisman home.  Imagine having 400 works of 20^th century art by 125 artists in your home!  (And what is hanging there is less than half of their art collection.)   Picasso, Magritte, Miro, Frankenthaler, Warhol, Lichtenstein—come up with a major name, and the Weismans probably have something (or many things) by that person in their collection.  They didn’t buy to invest—they bought things they liked, so they also have art by artists few people have heard of.  

Mostly, we really liked their art, which is saying a lot, since we usually don’t understand modern art, and often skip over it quickly when visiting art museums.  But, the part I don’t get about this place is the Weismans’ decorating sense.  They have exquisite taste in modern art executed in a variety of styles, yet their taste in furniture is dominated by large print floral chintz fabrics.  I can’t reconcile the combination of those two aesthetics in a room, and it made me a little crazy, but I tried to just ignore the furniture and draperies and enjoy the art.   (Too bad no photos are allowed inside, or I could illustrate this jarring phenomenon for you.)

 

Lots of pieces in the collection are memorable, but here is something that really captivated me--Mr. Weisman commissioned Andy Warhol to do a series of four paintings of him in the style of Warhol’s famous series of pictures of Marilyn Monroe.  How many people in this world have been immortalized by Andy Warhol--four times, no less?

Dick took some photographs in the front yard as we were leaving, and they give just the tiniest foreshadowing of the treasures that lie inside.

 This is one of the most unusual and eclectic art museums we have visited—we feel honored to have been guests in the home.  (And, we truly were guests—no admission was charged, no donation requested.)

The Rose Parade!

January 2, 2012

The past four days of programs and activities have been building to this day when we will have the honor of viewing what Dr. Tommy Cairns calls  “a living museum to one of nature’s greatest triumphs—the rose.”  In other words, we are going to the Rose Parade!

We are up at 4:45, and aboard our bus to the parade at 6:15.  We have to leave early, because the traffic is even worse than normal--a million people are wending their way to the parade route, and lots of streets are closed. 

Our seats are in bleachers about three miles into the five mile parade route.  We don’t have high expectations for the bands and other performers, figuring that by the time they get to us they will be pretty pooped.  We underestimate them.  The band members are strutting, cheer leaders are tossing each other into the air, and the drill teams are dancing and spinning their flags with gusto and huge smiles. When we see the television coverage later in the day, it doesn’t seem as if they did anything for the cameras that they didn’t do for us.

Our Road Scholar group reserved a large section of the bleachers, and each of our teams who worked on floats together sat together.  As the floats that the different teams worked on passed, we cheered loud and long for “our” floats.    Imagine our excitement when we saw that our Chinese Airline dragon float won the International Trophy for the most beautiful float from outside the United States.

The long anticipated heavily hyped huge float with the surfing dogs was a disappointment, not only because we never saw a dog surf while it was passing, but also because its big tank on top surrounded by plexiglass made for an ugly float. When we watched the parade replay on the big screen during lunch, we saw that the dogs would not surf for the television cameras either.  Dr. Cairns predicted this one would have technical difficulties, and he was right.  He also predicted that it would get a major trophy, and he was right about that, too.  This was the only float where we would disagree with the judges’ judgment.  Paraphrasing Dr. Cairns’ first principle of floats, this is a flower parade, not a dog parade. 

That said, the parade was an extraordinary display of pageantry and beauty. Here are just a few more of our favorite sights from the parade.

The Judge Who Teaches Judges to Judge

January 1, 2012

Our favorite activity today was a presentation by Dr. Tommy Cairns, an internationally renowned rose expert and exhibitor who has earned judging credentials both in Britain and the United States Rose Societies.  He has been a float judge in the past, and currently serves as the parade’s Judge Instructor.  

He gave us a very entertaining and information-packed presentation on the art of judging floats, provided a summary of the criteria for the 24 trophies awarded, highlighted features of exceptional floats from past parades, and previewed some of his favorites that will be in this year’s parade.   

The weighted scoring system is too complicated to get into here, but suffice it to say that for each float there are something like 26 factors for which each of the three judges gives a 1-10 score.  The judges see each float twice—once the day before it is complete and once the day before the parade, when it is complete and all riders are present and animation elements are in motion.  The float designer has an opportunity each time to make a statement to influence their impressions—two minutes at the first viewing and one minute at the second viewing.  The judges all get together over dinner at the end of the final judging day to decide on the trophies, by consensus.   They announce the results at 6 a.m. on parade day.  

Here are some of the principles of float design he shared with us that helped us look at the floats through the eyes of the judges: 

“This is a floral parade, not a seed parade.”  Every single centimeter of the float has to be covered in natural materials.  Seeds and vegetable matter are fine, but they should be used in moderation, to complement the flowers that are the stars of the float.  Most important of all the flowers are roses, since this is the Rose Parade, after all.  The winning floats will have roses in quantity and quality--a range of colors and a creative presentation is a plus. 

The floats have to demonstrate symmetry, but have asymmetrical elements for interest. They have to be decorated equally well on both sides—no fair showing preference to the side where the reviewing stands and television cameras are set up.  The back of the float is a sometimes neglected area—winning floats leave you with a lasting impression from their sign-off, holding your eye until they pass from sight.  Based on everything he said, we have high hopes for our China Airlines Dragon, which seems to demonstrate all his principles and is far more beautiful than any of the other dragons on floats he included in his presentation.

(Preview of coming attractions--this is the China Air float in the parade tomorrow!)

In the afternoon we visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the La Brea Tar Pits next door . The tar pits trapped and preserved unwitting ice age animals over 15,000 years ago and have continued to collect victims ever since.   We were amazed that the pits still sit there bubbling up gas and smelling of asphalt today.

LACMA is a complex of buildings that are more memorable and exceptional than the works of art inside them.  As Dick observed, the ratio of building size to content volume is perhaps the highest we have seen in an art museum—expansive galleries with lots of empty space between and around their contents is perhaps a style statement illustrating the California contemporary aesthetic, but it seems a waste of space to us Midwesterners.

 Anyway, we loved the bold and beautiful architecture, and sparked to some of the sculptures.  Dick was particularly charmed by this larger than life Jeff Koons balloon animal sculpture.

 We thought that a small exhibit of four Monet paintings of Rouen Cathedral and four Lichtenstein “manufactured Monets” (his words) based on the Monet paintings was a great example of the mediocrity of guys like Lichtenstein and Warhol, compared to their Impressionist predecessors.  We know this was not the intended take-away from this exhibit, based on the interpretive labeling, but we beg to differ.

In honor of the mountains that surround us wherever we go here, I close with the words of Chinese Song Dynasty painter Han Zhou.  “In painting landscapes, colors should reflect the four seasons:  spring mountains should be as sensual as a smile, summer mountains as green as  dewdrops, autumn mountains as bright and clean as washing, and winter mountains as somber and quiet as sleep.”  The mountains we see from our window reflect all these seasons as the sun rises and sets, and as we admire them in the brilliant sun.  Today the air is so clear that they are “as bright and clean as washing.”