Ocean Beach | O (b LOG N)

Cabrillo National Monument

July 15th, 2007 | No Comments | Posted in Hike

Tara, Ashby, and I visited Cabrillo National Monument last Sunday. The park is located at the tip of the Point Loma peninsula, west of San Diego. In case you didn’t know, in Spanish, “loma” means “hill”. It costs $5 for admittance. Your pass is good for 6 days. Our first visit we stopped by the visitor center and the monument to Cabrillo. He was the first European explorer to set foot on the West Coast of, what is today, the United States. We returned yesterday and reused our pass and this time we hiked about the tidal pool. The park is gorgeous.

After Cabrillo we drove to Ocean Beach, which is near, and grabbed brunch at a restaurant across from the beach that has a children’s play area inside. Ocean Beach is where all the old hippies settled. I dig the town. It reminds me of Santa Cruz. Most folks feel it’s a tad too grungy for their taste and frequent Pacific Beach or La Jolla shores instead.

Activities at Cabrillo National Monument:

Learn about the 16th century explorer that the park is named for.

Hiking. The two-mile Bayside Trail affords spectacular views of San Diego Bay and the city beyond, and takes you through one of the last remaining remnants of coastal sage scrub habitat in the world.

The rocky intertidal area at Cabrillo National Monument is one of the best protected examples of these unique ecosystems in Southern California.

The Lighthouse. It has been reported that it can be seen up to 39 miles away while at sea. It is one of the original eight lighthouses on the West Coast, restored and refurnished to reflect what life was like in the 1800s.

And more…

Resources

Tags: Bayside Trail, Cabrillo National Monument, Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo, Ocean beach, Official park site, Pacific Beach, Point Loma peninsula, San Diego, San Diego Bay, Santa Cruz, USD, West Coast

Madeline Island and Bayfield’s Applefest

October 7th, 2006 | No Comments | Posted in Life

The family and I travelled north this weekend to spend a couple nights on Madeline Island. It happened to coincide with Bayfield’s Applefest, which was a fortuitous circumstance as we had never been, but I have heard tons about it. Bayfield is a pituresque town on the south shore of Lake Superior, which seems to be an eclectic mix of ex-hippies and farmers. As you’ll see from the photo’s the Fall colors were in full bloom.

The cabin we stayed at on Madeline Island was allegedly “waterfront,” which apparently means lake superior is about 75 yards away through some trees and across the road (photo to the right). However, the beach was the best damn beach I’ve ever seen on Lake Superior. Quite stunning. I was told the beach in the state park on the Island is the significantly better than any other place on the Island, but this was such a short visit we didn’t get a chance to see it up close. From a distance it looked to be a very deep beach, similar to what you would expect to see from an Ocean beach and not a Lake beach.

Ashby turned 9 months old on this trip and had some other milestones. It was the first time she was ever on a boat. She had previously stayed in a cabin and has been to Wisonsin before. To date she has been to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, and California. She has already flown twice by now. She will be flying again when we go to California at the end of October again. KMWorld is in San Jose and rather than missing Ashby’s first Halloween we’re going to spend Halloween with Julie (my sister) and the Ekstroms.

As we walked around Bayfield on Saturday, which was packed with people, I stumbled across this fellow wearing a MindTouch Tshirt!! Ok, so it’s really my father in law. Although, I was recently related a story by a friend of mine in which he and his wife were in the Badlands camping when someone recognized the MindTouch shirt his wife was wearing and excitedly proclaimed: “hey I know those guys!” Evidently our brand has developed some equity as I have heard similar stories to this more than a few times. The setting is usually an urban one though.

There was this band playing music at Bayfield that got my attention when they announced they were from North Carolina. I’m unclear as to what their band name was, but they were quite good. I’m not sure if they were called “Bus”, “Big Pretty” or “Red Rockets.” Anyway, they had a suuuper unique sound. It was like ska fused with hip-hop with a tinge of folk/rock, and I’m certain I even heard a blue grass influence in a couple songs. Sounds weird, but it worked. At any rate, it turns out the fellow on the Cello (to the right) graduated two years earlier than me from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Computer Science program. Apparently after a stint at IBM he decided to pursue music full-time. We even had mutual friends, he knew Matt McCallus and John Crouch (Matt is at Red Storm still, I think, and John I believe is a full-time musician now). Crazy.

In general, it was a good mini-mini-vacation. If you do make it to Madeline Island definitely stop by the “Island Oasis” bar on a weekend night after 9pm. It’s a trippy local hang-out that is open only in the Summer and Fall (I’m told). Kind of hard to describe, but certainly worth stopping at.