Our motorhome is parked this afternoon at Shady Lane.  Anne, Mary Helen and Mom Woods are out shopping.  Dad is relaxing inside on this rainy day.  Mark Davidson and Frank and Tim left for home with the masses yesterday.  At least here the weather for the weekend was marvelous. 

Anne and I returned from a wonderful visit to Alex in San Francisco Monday morning.  Our flights to and from Newark NJ to Harrisburg were cancelled, but United rebooked us on a later flight through Chicago.  Too bad neither they nor Expedia bothered to alert us to the fact.  Anne spent hours on the phone trying to find out what to do after we noticed our flights were cancelled.  Only after Expedia gave up trying to reach Continental did we sift our way through the Continental (our main carrier was this airline) and United sites to log into our reservations and find the new flights listed (in addition to the cancelled flights).  We smartly selected our seats and made it to the airport on time Sunday evening.

We arrived home at noontime Monday and began provisioning the motorhome.  I even baked granola on that day.  We finished on Tuesday and pulled out Wednesday morning.  Our rain gauge at home had registered 3.2” of rain between our departure to California and our return.  Otherwise there was no sign of Irene there.  Potted plants on the porch hadn’t even blown over.  We knew we would be driving across the region flooded by the tropical storm.  In fact we saw the Walkill River in NY and the Connecticut River in CT in flood stage.  A few towns in Connecticut and their traffic signals were without power as we travelled through them.  This encouraged us to slide our route south a bit to the coastal zone and I-95 to insure a smooth trip.  Despite the conditions, we arrived at Eastham Wednesday evening.

We found Mom and Dad well.  Mom actually seemed to be breathing easier as the weekend progressed.  They walked twice to Kingsbury Beach over the weekend.  We all largely avoided the crowds but stopped for a drink at an outdoor bar, saw the movie, The Debt, and bicycled to Nauset Beach.  Anne and I walked early one morning from near Coast Guard Beach along the beach south to Nauset inlet to watch hundreds of common and roseate terns and even a few roseate terns.  We saw only a few shorebirds but are keeping our eyes open for any wayward buff-breasted sandpipers. 

Shady Lane is pleasingly familiar.  Irene did little damage breaking mostly branches and only a  couple of the brittle black locusts that shade the lots there.  Widening bushes have reduced the open space in the yards a bit since we brought our children here for vacations in the 1980’s and ’90’s.  The lots are leafier.  We have fond memories of vacationing with the Woods clan in the cottages and biking with the children to Coast Guard Beach, Great Pond, and Kingsbury Beach with the “target ship” off shore in those days.

Tomorrow we start north and east to where the Atlantic coast becomes rocky, a region I have never seen.  We look forward to seeing the tides of Fundy and lighthouses perched on cliffs.  Perhaps the scenery will resemble that of the California coast that we just toured with Alex from San Francisco.  We drove to the coast there through the Anderson Valley of Mendocino County where we visited vineyards.  All of the wine we sampled was good!

We lodged at Ft. Bragg where Anne and I boated into the deep water Pacific in search of sea birds.  We joyed in rafts of black-footed albatross and saw one Laysan albatross (adding that to our North American life-list.)  We saw numerous other shearwaters, storm petrels, and gulls, but no Hawaiian petrel hoped for by the three folks on the boat doing a big big year.  We hopped too, but were very satisfied adding two  birds to our life list, the Laysan albatross and Buller’s shearwater.

From Ft. Bragg we auto toured two days along the coast with Alex back to San Francisco with stops at Mendocino, Bodega Bay, and Point Reyes.  There was wonderful scenery, cliffs and great island rocks, roaring surf upon narrow beaches, bushy dunes, and redwood forests!  And last we reached the great bridge across the Golden Gate and the skyline of the great city that Alex has blessed with his residency. 

He returned to work and we continued our tour to Monterey south of Frisco.  We boated once again with Ms. Shearwater in search of exotic seabirds but found only the usual until near the end of the day.  Then I looked up to see a dark bird that I first thought was a black-footed albatross - it was similarly colored.  But then I realized it was much, much too small and I raised my hand and pointed.  At the same time someone shouted something.  Debra Love Shearwater turned her head to the bird and then to the captain shouting, “follow that bird!”  That bird was a mystery to me.  I knew it was similar to but not a Murphy’s petrel.  My mind saw an image of two other birds in the National Geographic Guide that I remembered had been seen a few times in North America.  I thought this was the bird on the right in the book, but I couldn’t remember the name.  One of the crew called it out, “great-winged petrel.”  Ms. Shearwater shouted that photos must be taken.  They were and I have already downloaded, printed, and pasted copies into my life-list book.  One of our fellow bird tourists could say nothing, but “good bird.”  Too bad none of the big-yearer’s who had been on our first voyage had been on this one.

I concluded and commented on this trip that pelagic birding is like playing slot machines.  You put in your money and sometimes you strike gold.  Other times you just get sea sick.  Pelagic birding on boats is uncomfortable, difficult, sometimes dangerous, and sometimes unrewarding, but it provides the only practical means of observing up close those elegant and fabulous fliers that simply turn their nose at the sight of land to zip with the wind over the rolling ocean.  On this day we had paid our money and the slots came up triple!  This was only the fourth time a great-winged petrel had been seen from within the boundaries of this continent.  Could you ask for better birding than that?  And we had good views for at least a minute and decent views for another five.

After landing we returned to the city and spent the weekend with Alex.  We toured a bit and worked with him on the apartment before departing Sunday evening to catch our “red-eye” flight home.  A lovely visit over.

Now we prepare to begin another.