Soon, the city will be mine and Vigo’s… mainly Vigo’s.
My friend Adriana recently confessed to me that, while she was enjoying this site, she’d been “skimming over the science stuff no offense”. I would like to assure her that yes, we have taken advantage of our days off here as well.
Early on, we had the good fortune of having a few visitors descend on Los Angeles from across North America: Charlie from Kingston, and Shiva and Paula driving all the way from Texas for President’s Day weekend. We saw the Getty museum and then went out for a ridiculously tasty dinner in Beverly Hills that, for the 5 of us, cost nearly what I make in a month as a grad student. At the table next to us, we noticed the Ghostbusters II actor quoted above – Jess I expect you to get this one without internet cheating!
Last week Rob and I traveled to San Francisco for a couple of days. We had been working at catching birds for 11 days straight, since I thought it would make the most sense to exhaust ourselves with catching and then take an extended break, allowing the birds time to settle down before starting observations. Rob has family in Palo Alto just a short drive away from San Francisco, so we were very lucky to have warm beds and delicious meals provided. We spent one day visiting the Monterey Aquarium (an amazing place) and one day getting a taste of San Francisco (quite literally – we visited Golden Gate Park and went for clam chowder at the waterfront before heading home). San Francisco is a beautiful city. We drove around some of the residential areas, and the houses have a lot of ingenious ways of dealing with the steep hills. I’m going to go there for another short visit on my way home to Canada in April – hopefully I’ll have more time to explore!
My favourite travel adventures seem to happen when you don’t have any expectations, and Rob and I found some of this kind of adventure on our way to San Francisco. We followed the winding route along the coastline on the way there, and happened upon a bunch of basking elephant seals on one of the beaches we passed (we only stopped because Rob was wondering what everyone else had pulled over for). Male elephant seals are 2-3 times the size of females. During the winter, they gather on the beach and fight violently over their harems. Unfortunately we were a few weeks too late to see the breeding activity: the harems were mostly rolling around, scratching themselves, yawning and tossing sand on their backs (as well as moulting and nursing a few pups, I guess). But they were still quite amazing creatures, and I was shocked at how close we were able to get (don’t worry – we kept to the path that had been marked out by an outfit called “Friends of the Elephant Seals”). The picture above is of some elephant seal wanderings, and here is one of a harem:
From March 11, 2008