Day 6 - Woodside

Today was a day of doing not much of anything.  It was delightful.

We moseyed around the house and had coffee, while Oceana helped her dad make his way off to work.  After he left, Oceana took us for a drive around the sights of the Santa Cruz Mountains.  It was really nice to be able to sightsee as a passenger.  You would think that if you wanted so soak in the scenery, the best way to do it would be on a motorcycle. That's only partially true though.  You have to keep so more focus on the road that you can't really rubberneck, unlike being in a car where you have a lot more leeway to drive slowly and take in the views.  It's even better when you have someone else at the wheel.

Oceana took us down to a little county park that basically a short hiking trail that led through a couple redwood groves.  Unfortunately a bridge along the path had been closed off due to erosion, so it cut our walk short, but it was still cool.

Surprisingly, my only banana slug encounter of the trip.

 We toured around La Honda, the town Oceana grew up in.  It was a hippified little place, and had some notoriety from the 60s and 70s with Ken Kesey and company.  Apparently, the community had really gone downhill in recent years though, due to meth.  I don't know, if meth was a big problem there, it was one of the most pleasant tweaker havens I've seen.  From my naive point of view, it seemed like a laid back, pastoral sort of town, the kind of place I'd strongly consider living in, if the opportunity arose.

We made our way out to the coast and stopped by the Pigeon Point lighthouse, because, why not?  It's tied for the tallest lighthouse on the west coast.  It's condemned now, but Oceana got to spend the night in it when she was a kid.  She was apparently unappreciative

We had lunch in Half Moon Bay at Tres Amigos.  I had a chili verde burrito, and it was what a chili verde burrito should be.  We have decent burritos in Seattle, but for whatever reason, we rarely see chili verde up here.  It was good to have it again...and done properly, that is.

We stopped at a grocery store afterward and got some supplies for dinner and headed back up to Oceana's place.  It was pretty cool, while we were down at the coast, we could see Oceana's property up in the hills.  You couldn't make out many details, it was just one of those clear patches of land at the top of a mountain that you can see in the lowlands and think "man, whoever lives up there must have a great view."  And yup, they do.

There wasn't much else that happened that evening.  We hung out with Oceana's parents, made burgers on the grill, and had a fire in the firepit.   It was the last day of the meteor shower so we stayed out by the fire and waited for the moon to go down.  We ended up moving to the hot tub at some point, and watched for shooting stars from there.  The next day was Oceana's birthday so we made sure to stay up until 12 to wish her a happy birthday.  I think we ended up staying out there until 1:30 or so before calling it a night.  It had been a great day of relaxation and general contentment, not something any of us were eager to have come to an end.