La Jolla / Carlsbad

February 3, 2024

It’s the calm before the storm. Today is gorgeous, but by midday tomorrow a fearsome storm is due to inundate the Southern California coast. It’s a moving day for us, but a very short one - less than an hour up the coast to nearby Carlsbad, where we look forward to our dinner date with our new friend Wendy, whom we met last winter in Tucson when she recognized Rachael biking past her on the loop from our journals and flagged her down.

With such a short drive ahead there’s plenty of time to dawdle along the way, starting with a stop at one of our favorite spots in Southern California: La Jolla Cove. It’s a busy place already when we arrive around ten, the coast walkway already dense with walkers taking in the astonishing spectacle.

This is at least our fifth time coming to La Jolla - we’ve biked through it on a pit of loop tours from San Diego, and we stayed here on two of our winter sojourns. So we know what to expect, but it doesn’t matter - it’s as thrilling a spectacle now as it was the first time we came here, taking in the dense and colorful wildlife drama unfolding on the cliffs and shoreline just below you - the antics of the barking and boisterous seals and sea lions, the gulls and terns and cormorants, the ubiquitous ground squirrels, and above all the magnificent brown pelicans. For us, it’s much better than a visit to one of the great cathedrals or castles because it’s so animated and dynamic.

We’re there for a couple of hours, Rachael and I largely going our own ways both because I’m stopped so often with the camera and because my knees seem particularly bad this morning. I’m starting to really look forward to our return to Portland and my date with my doctor for another steroid shot!

Not much else needs to be said here - let’s just look.

The view up the coast from La Jolla Cove.

The oxalis are in full bloom, as are the birds of paradise and other ornamentals. It’s the most colorful we’ve seen it here, I think. The wet spring must have been really good for the vegetation.

It’s not just the flowers that are colorful today. They call this a brown pelican, but it’s much more colorful than that.

So can we all ageee that this is the most colorfully entertaining bird?

Allen’s hummingbird again, but a much better look than that distant one in Balboa Park.

Action shot. This bird was amazing, his bib flashing like a bright red beacon whenever he looked my way.

I’ve scattered the pelican photos so it won’t seem like I’ve included so many of them.

Also a Heermann’s gull, but an immature.

I should have taken more pinniped shots.

Another Brandt’s cormorant, a bird that’s no slouch in the color department either and worth many shots.

I’m sure there’s the perfect caption for this amusing shot.

La Jolla Cove would be spectacular even without the wildlife.

A royal tern, the bird I was wishing for a closer shot of yesterday.

Astonishing. So do pelicans turn more colorful in breeding season?

A double crested cormorant, performing his one-legged balancing act.

We still had time to fill before we could check in to our motel in Carlsbad, so at my suggestion we dropped down the hill to Torrey Pines Beach for a second walkabout. I was looking forward to it, having a vague memory of stopping here for lunch some years ago on our way back to San Diego and thinking it looked worth exploration. It wasn’t as interesting as I’d expected though. I’ve probably gotten too single minded about birds, but the beach is really too built up and developed for that.

Willet. Or won’t it, Keith would like to know.

We pull into our motel, a Motel 6, at right about one - the earliest we were told we could check for an available room when we called this morning. No room is available now though, because they claim we don’t actually have a reservation. I’m sure we do though so I state that I’ll be right back after I go back to the car for the evidence. When I get there though, I sheepishly see that she’s right. We don’t have a reservation here, because we’ve come to the wrong Motel 6. In fact, little Carlsbad has three of them. Ours is a couple miles further north still, and fortunately we find it on only our second try.

Dinner with Wendy is great. She’s picked a fine choice for us, and we enjoy an excellent meal as we catch up on each other’s lives over the year since we first met back in Tucson. And Rachael really enjoys her meal tonight, an easily chewable salmon fettuccini - a big step up on the yogurt, scrambled eggs, cream of wheat and stewed prunes she’s been mostly subsisting on for the last several days. Unfortunately, I butchered the photography duties so you’ll just have to imagine the three of us enjoying our meal and each other’s company.

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Wendy BeaudoinI really enjoyed our evening together, Scott and Rachael. Thanks so much for stopping by. It’s nice Rachael was able to eat something besides cream of wheat!
I hope you’re not hit too hard by the storm.
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9 months ago

Scott AndersonTo Wendy BeaudoinThanks, Wendy. We really enjoyed the evening also. And we’re fine, because we stayed in Carlsbad. It just sounded too dangerous to drive up north today, and we managed to talk our way into a full refund from our airbnb reservation in Solvang.

We did upgrade our lodging though, and are down south a couple of miles at a better motel than the Motel 6. Hopefully by Tuesday conditions will improve and we can head north.
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9 months ago

marilyn swettMore incredible bird pictures, Scott. Thanks for sharing them with us!
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9 months ago

Wendy BeaudoinTo Scott AndersonThat’s good to hear. It’s smart to avoid the area if you can.
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9 months ago