The Itch

Every once in a while, I get the itch. That urge which pushes me to spend more time, effort and money in pursuit of one thing than for anything else. Mine is an itch for TRAVEL!

Until this last weekend, I'd been in southern California continuously now for 9 months, the longest that I've stayed in any one location without a major change in scenory since I left for university. As such, the wanderlust has been naging at me for some time, thought to no avail since my van was unreliable. About $4,000 took take of the van's reliability and once I was satisfied with it I took off North to Monterey, for the greatest part following Pacific Coast Highway.

In Pismo beach I stopped at Monarch grove and observed the clusters of butterflies that congregate there. The local researchers reported that there were roughly 15,000 monarch butterflies in this grove at the time. This estimate was based on counts made by capturing several clusters in paper bags while it was still cold in the morning and individually counting the insects in each cluster, extrapolating the total number from the number of clusters and the average cluster size. It interested me that the butterflies didn't seem to care whether the trees that they roosted in were native or not, only that there was a grove of them large enought to reduce the amount of wind coming through.

That night I arrived in Monterey and passed the sleeping hours in the parking lot of a McDonalds. The next day I was treated to a tour of the Aquarium by my roommate's father, who volunteers there regularly. The aquarium requires about 2000 people to keep it running and accomodate the two and half million visitors per year. Of the staff only about 400 are actually paid employees, the rest being volunteers, many of whom hope to eventually become part of the paid group.

That night, I actually chatted with one of the volunteers (as well as a local stained glass artisan) that I met at an English pub downtown. The two of them typically worked evenings for the Aquarium's catering division, serving food at events held after the exhibits close to the public and otherwise wouldn't be able to make a living there.

On New Year's Eve I went to Marina State Beach and in my walk lent further support to the notion that death just seems to like being around me. One my walk along the beach, I found several dead sea birds, a large dead pinniped and one bleached braincase of what (I assume) was once a juvenile pinniped. The large pinniped wasn't very far decayed, but enought to keep me from being able to tell weather it was a small elephant seal or a full grown sea lion. The fins were tucked under the bloated body and the face was sufficiently eaten away to keep me from seeing if it had ear lobes. And here I was taking a walk without my collecting bags! I opted not to call Fish and Wildlife (formerly Fish and Game).

That night, after taking in the First Night festivities in downtown Monterey, I drove south along PCH to Big Sur, where I the next day I hiked among giant sequoias and climbed Mt. Manuel. I noticed that many of the largest trees grew in clumps of three or four and had eventually fused at the base, resulting in trees with bases up to 15 feet across, but upper reaches that quickly thinned down to four or five across at most. The hikes and the views were exhilerating albeit tiring and I think that I would have had more zest for hiking later in my trip if I hadn't exerted myself so much on that day.

The On tuesday I returned to southern Califonia, stopping at several beaches along the way to search for jade, watch basking elephant seals, explore tide pools and read Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth while enjoying a beautiful Californian sunset. Insidentally, the jade that I found was of low quality and in pieces typically too large to cary back to the van.