Week of Camp Ma/Birthday

As is usual, the end of the summer brought both the kid's birthday and a week when Chad was travelling a lot.  We took advantage of it to have our almost-traditional week of "Camp Ma".

The teen wanted to hunt flowers up in San Francisco, so we went to the San Francisco Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park and spent a few hours wandering about.  Kiddo is 17 now!

There were lots of interesting plants to be seen; these were especially vivid.

During lunch, I found that the phone can do good things to a photo.

Later in the week, Nim and I took a wee backpacking trip up Black Mountain.  We went ultralight, with just a tarp, sleeping bag/quilt, a bag of KFC for dinner, and a box of toaster pastries (aka Pop-Tarts, but these were a better brand) for breakfast.  Our "dissolve a Starbucks Via pod into UHT milk and call it a latte" strategy was, in the kid's parlance, somewhat suss.  One thing we noted was that by this point of the summer, the kid had slept outside, mostly unsheltered under the stars, more summer nights that not.  This semi-feral existence is indeed properly appreciated.

On the actual birthday, we decided to head out to the coast.  It was a beautiful day!

There were still a few elephant seals hauled out onto the beach at Ano Nuevo.  The scale is hard to tell, but this guy was about 12 feet long and probably weighted a couple thousand pounds according to the volunteer who was posted to keep people off the beach.

You can see a second seal poking his nose up out of the water in this one.  He seemed like he was just playing around on this hot summer day.

Further down the beach, we could hear deep rumbling noises, which we found were emanating from a pair of juvenile males practicing some of their dominance moves.  Again, it's hard to tell from this picture, but they were using their tails to counterbalance the fronts of their bodies as they reared up out of the water and slapped chests.  Quite entertaining to watch and listen to!

Back on the beach we were allowed down on, we found quite an armada of birds.  There was apparently an unusual abundance of fish in the water here that day, and the birds are not dummies.

Watching pelicans dive is always fun.  They are such unlikely looking critters.

When asked what kind of cake was desired, the kid replied "I want a confection!"  Chocolate cake with coffee butterscotch, chocolate ganache, and cream cheese frosting, covered with toasted almonds was the result.  (Fortunately Chad made it home from his work trip in time to share cake.)

And thus, summer was over and it was time for school to start.