Cloudy at Sunset
I came home after work today and looked outside at the clear sky and setting sun and thought, gosh it'd be neat to see the sun set over the ocean. I gave my friends Bill and Julie Humphries a call to see if they wanted to go along, but they turned out to be busy. I wasn't sure there was anyone else I could call who wouldn't be out-of-the-way enough to make it impossible to get there in time (Ceej and David? John? Each lives some distance from the ocean), since it was already a quarter after seven, so I wrestled briefly with the question of whether I wanted to go by myself, and finally thought, oh sure, I'll go.
Well, I made an error. The first was deciding to drive up to Half Moon Bay rather than down to Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz is decidedly closer to my apartment, but I'm less familiar with the area and wasn't sure I could easily find a convenient beach without driving around the city for a while. But, it turns out that Half Moon Bay is rather farther away than I'd thought, a number of miles north of where John lives, whereas I'd thought it was at roughly the same altitude.
Yeah, yeah, getting out the maps would have cleared all this up, but I was in a hurry and was just glad I remembered to bring my jacket this time.
Another problem was that I ran headlong into the Bay Area's fabled "microclimates", radical changes in weather across relatively short distances caused by proximity to the ocean and all of these darned hills around here. As I approached Half Moon Bay Drive I saw that it was decidedly cloudy up in the hills, and by the time I reached the summit I saw that there would be no visible sunset at the ocean that night. Oh, well. I will have to find a good source for oceanside weather for future excursions.
But I figured I could salvage the trip by just driving to a beach and walking along it and getting my feet wet in the ocean. The problem with that turned out to be that most of the beaches along the ocean in that area are state beaches which charge for parking and close at sunset. So I finally drove to a small unpatrolled beach near the city of Half Moon Bay and did get a little walking in at the top of the dunes. It wasn't quite the same, but it was okay.
Next time: Must plan better.
On this excursion, though, I did get 'homesick' for summer vacations on Cape Cod with my family. The Bay Area isn't the same; it's just too urbanized, and too darned big. Even the beaches are fairly urban, and this regulation of the beaches drove home that they're just not recreation areas in the sense I'm used to; they're money generators.
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