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As our tour boat returns to its mooring in Avalon
Harbor (July 20) ( Large image, small ) |
Chapter 1:
Madison flies out to California
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Madison and M’lyn arrived Sunday the seventeenth of July, and naturally, their first target was to go to Disneyland. I figured then that this was not the sort of place I would want to take my camera to, maybe I was thinking of going on all sorts of high-g rides, rather I left it home and depended on Mark’s little waterproof camera and any snapshots that he might be inclined to take. As it happens, I could find only a few pictures in his camera, and all but a few of them are here. To the left, in the first snapshot, (big image, small), M & M seem to be looking over a map or guide-brochure shortly after our arrival at Disneyland, and below that M’lyn is looking out from a tree-house on Tom Sawyer Island (big image, small), and below that, Madison is at the same place (big image, small). To the right, Madison is on the raft, we’re waiting for it to shove off for the island (big image, small).
We did almost every ride and attraction imaginable that did not involve roller-coastering, since that particular kind of fun is not Maddy’s meat at all. In particular, we went on Soarin’ over California a large number of times, both before and after lunch. Various other rides, none of them captured by Mark with his camera. Problem is, he was having too much fun going on rides with Madison to pull it out of his pocket.
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One attraction that we did get some pictures of was a lecture where those in the audience were given a sheet of paper and pencil, and shown how to do a simple cartoon. Needless to say, since Madison is already a devoted cartoonist, this was something that she was interested in. Afterwards, we went through a kind of interactive museum with lots of examples of zoetropes, and facilities for the people to draw their own zoetrope strip. That’s what Madison is doing in the first picture to the right. If you look closely in the small image or the large one, you’ll see a pair of elbows in the upper right. That was me, looking on through an internal window, and Mark devoted a shot to that view, below (big image, small).
We finally went to dinner, at La Brea Bakery, and I have to say that it was not a memorable meal, either for food or for service. From there, we went home.
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The next day was Tuesday, the nineteenth, when M’lyn had to fly home. She and Maddy and I got up early for a quick drive to LAX, and with loads of kisses and hugs, we sent M’lyn off and drove home for breakfast and a nap before the rest of the day’s activity.
And the day’s activity was, for the most part, to pay a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits, which Harris had visited when she was here as well. When you get right down to it, it’s a small attraction, easily coverable in an hour or so. To the left you see two cell-phone snaps of Madison in the big hall where there’s a dominating mammoth skeleton. (Left picture: big image, small; right: big image, small.)
I was a little disappointed in this visit to the Pits: there’s a fishbowl work-lab where people do fine work on fossils, but it must have been lunch time when Maddy and I visited; certainly, Harris could see people working there when we stopped by in February; the other disappointment was that there was nobody working in the open pits where fossils are currently being excavated. Harris and I hadn’t gone there during her visit, but when Cindy and Mike and Mason visited a few years ago, we were fascinated to look down into the damp and tarry hole and see people actually pulling things up. All Madison and I could see was the empty hole.
We had lunch at a restaurant in the neighborhood, and then drove back home, where as I recall, we spent the rest of the day reading.
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On the pier, waiting to board (big image, small) |
Wednesday the twentieth was a day for a big adventure, but as I recall, it almost didn’t happen. Before her departure from Greene, Maddy had expressed some interest in going to Catalina, and I was certainly up for that kind of trip. But I rather stupidly started investigating the possibility of a ferry-ride a bit late in the game. By the night before, an early departure, giving us a couple of hours on either side of noon on the island, was out of the question: ferry all booked up. So we had to settle for a reservation that would get us to Catalina around one, and unless we wanted to get back to Pasadena unreasonably late at night, we’d have just barely two hours on the island. I even had to make the ferry reservation by phone, because the web reservation service needed more lead time. This I did, and started looking about for tours in a glass-bottom boat or one with windows below the water line such as we had used in 1998 when Madison was a toddler, brought to Pasadena by her mothers in the Fall.
| We waited a while to get onto the tour boat. | |
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| (Big image, small.) | (Big image, small.) |
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| (Big image, small.) | (Big image, small.) |
It was the latter kind of tour boat that we got a reservation on; and thinking things over, and seeing how excellent our views were from side-viewing subsurface windows, I realize now that we were very fortunate.
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Murky water at first (big image, small). |
At any rate, as soon as we got onto Avalon’s dry land, we had to rush to pick up the tickets we had reserved for the tour, a five or ten minutes’ hurried walk along the shore road: the tour was supposedly starting just a little while after we landed. But the tour departed from a pier right across the street from where we got the tickets, so we actually were in good time, in fact we could lounge on the pier and look down at the numerous fish swimming between the pier and the tour boat, as you see in the lower right picture to the right.
There turned out to be only five paying customers: us and a married couple, and a woman traveling alone. So we could have more of a conversation with the tour guide, rather than be a completely passive audience.
I took lots of pictures on the tour, too many to give an individualized description of each one. So in the array below, each picture has in its caption a plus “( + )” and a minus “( - )” in parentheses. To get the large version of the image, you click on the “( + )”, and to get the smaller version, click on the “( - )” or on the thumbnail itself.
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In the two rows below, you see lots of Opaleye Perch
Girella nigricans.
Look at the larger images and you'll see why immediately. You’ll also notice that in these pictures, we’re in the midst of a kelp forest. I was interested to see that this kelp seems very different from what we see washed up on the Maine beaches. This seems to be very branched, while the Eastern kind is just a three-or-four-inch ribbon, unbranched. |
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| ( + ) ( - ) | ( + ) ( - ) | ( + ) ( - ) | ( + ) ( - ) |
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| A couple of Garibaldi Hypsypops rubicundus below | |||
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| ( + ) ( - ) | ( + ) ( - ) | ( + ) ( - ) | ( + ) ( - ) |
| In the two left pictures, Madison is tossing food to the fish below; the right pictures show us getting in to port in Avalon. | |||
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| ( + ) ( - ) | ( + ) ( - ) | ( + ) ( - ) | ( + ) ( - ) |
Thursday, 21 July was, as I recall, a day for staying home and doing not much of anything, but I’m going to have to check with Madison about this.
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Friday, 22 July, I thought we ought to take a ride up the newly-reopened Angeles Crest Highway, State route 2. It had been closed for quite a while because parts of it washed away in mudslides. One reason I wanted to do this was that like the trip to Catalina, it was something we did in October 1998 when Maddy, Diane, and the pregnant Marilyn made their first visit to Pasadena.
The top left picture (big image, small) and the middle in the lower row (big image, small) represent only a few of the many attempts I’ve made to show the magnificence of the views from up here. But to tell the truth, I’ve never been satisfied with the results, not this day either. It’s really terrific for the variety of views you can get. Top right (big image, small) and bottom left (big image, small) show Maddy trying to do the same thing I’ve failed at; she hasn’t shown me her results. The bottom right picture (big image, small) I’m particularly fond of: it might even be worth while printing up.
That took us only an hour or an hour and a half. Mostly we had to get ready for the redeye flight that we were taking back to Rhode Island. From there, we would go almost immediately to Maine, in a complicated transfer procedure that I’ll say more about below. But the upshot was that today, Friday, was Maddy’s last day in California, no more pictures to show in this chapter of our four-week adventure.