to Oakland 16 July 2017

Ready and eager to travel an hour early, we walked our headlands -- what a beautiful day! Why would anyone want to leave a place like this on a day like today? 

Oh, I remember, yesterday it was foggy and grey all day. Let's go somewhere that cloudy and grey is accompanied by inviting water, at least for a few weeks.

After the customary photographs of Caspar Beach and the departing pair...

...Sienna drove us, via our "secret" winding country road through the redwoods and past Montgomery Woods...

...over the backbone of the Coast Range...

(from the top, you can see to the Coast on a clear day. We live just about exactly in the middle of this picture where the land meets the sky.)

...then down through the oak and chaparral to the Russian's River's inland valley and its acres of vineyards.

Mendocino County is such a beautiful place to live!

At the Sonoma County Line, US 101 becomes freeway, and the beauty party begins to come unstuck.

North Coast natives call the counties south of Mendocino "down below" and there are advantages to going there, a principle one being numerous excellent restaurants. Catelli's now in its fifth generation of family ownership, is one of our favorites.

Sienna braved the increasingly busy highway south of Geyserville, a sort of southern edge of Mendonesia, and dropped us at Santa Rosa airport, where we caught the Airport Express to OAK – Oakland International, our point of departure for Hawaii.

I did something strange to my camera, and it took some wild photos ... Neil, our Airport Express driver to Petaluma, who chattered constantly, told us all that Sunday afternoons on 101 were nightmarish, with everyone who'd gone to the wine country driving home. He took us on a back road into Petaluma, where we transferred to Mike's bus, and the real fun began. He too took a back road, the Black Point Cutoff over the Petaluma River, but through San Rafael there are no options. 

By the time we reached the East Bay, any suggestions of natural beauty were safely extinguished by a layer of summer smog.