2008 California

Posted on 2 December, 2011 by John Curd Posted in — No Comments ↓

Just prior to our second house-sitting trip to Spain in 2007, I re-established contact with friend and former colleague Bets Strohl in California. As luck would have it, she and her partner Bryan were to be off on two vacations almost back to back in September, 2008 and were interested in our house and cat sitting services to cover their absences. Naturally we were happy to help. It would also give us a chance to catch up with many other friends from my days of travelling to San Francisco on business.

With a few days lead in and lead out, we spent five weeks at Bets and Bryan’s house in Tomales, about 45 miles north of San Francisco in Marin county. Tomales does suffer from the infamous west coast fog in the mornings and evenings but that tends to recede and leave blue skies during the day. We had rain for only three days out of 35 and otherwise the reliable California sun shone for us. That’s an average I am happy to live with.

We were mobile thanks mostly to Bets’s intriguing Toyota Camry Hybrid (many thanks) and travelled around seeing what we could. Locally there was Tomales Bay, the Point Reyes National Seashore and the wine country of the Sonoma and Napa valleys to keep us amused, to name but a few. A little further afield we visited San Francisco, Monterey and Lake Tahoe. Blog entries describing what we were up to, together with a few diary photographs, are in Traveblog. There is also a related

Google map for orientation.

Below is a slightly larger than normal pictorial summary of our trip featuring photographs which are generally not duplicates of any in the blog entries.