The halfway point

Here in Boulder Creek, CA, and in San Jose starting Saturday, I've reached one goal of this journey. It's halfway in the sense that a few weeks from now I'll head back to DC, though the roughly 6,500 miles are almost certainly more than half the total for the round trip and I have no idea whether the 33 days are more or less than half its duration.

Even "goal" is a misnomer. The Bay Area is an important destination, but the real goal was to spend time with loved ones and see some U.S. and Canadian sights for the first time. Every day has been a piece of that goal, and as I reread this blog every day has been a delight and a success. Even when it was chilly and cloudy, since another goal was to escape the DC heat and humidity.

Speaking of that, yesterday as I came out of the redwoods Penny reported 75° for the first time in weeks, as I noted in yesterday's post, but then I got back into cooler air. Today when I pulled out of Westport the air was 55°. When I crossed the hills back to U.S. 101 it was 75°. In Chico it was 95° but fortunately the humidity seemed low. At 4 p.m. coming down the East Bay it was back in the 70s, and here it's pleasantly cool.

Chico, you ask? (OK, you don't but I'm going to tell you anyway.) Last night I learned that Rachel's cousin Wren is in Chico with her family. This led to another spur-of-the-moment route change; I headed inland instead of following the coast to the Golden Gate. Not a big day for photographs, so I'll give you just one: Clear Lake, whose shore I drove along for what seemed like an hour. I took this photo near the town of Lucerne, with chalets and an Alpine Park...you get the drift if you've seen the original Lucerne. Still, it's quite pretty.

The rest of the trip was miles and miles of orchards on the way to Chico, and miles and miles of brown dry hills heading south toward San Jose. I took a few more photos, but none made it into this post. Good-night.