Keeping Connected

Today was a day for keeping connected with family and friends. And, as such, it was a very good day.

I got up fairly early in the morning, and after doing some revisions to yesterday’s Blog entry and posting a few photographs, I took Edie up to the dog park where we had had so much fun yesterday afternoon. There were not many dogs there this morning, and nobody really wanted to play with Edie. We just walked around a bit, and then returned to the motel.

John had picked up some breakfast items from the buffet in the office, and Edie seemed to think that the blueberry bagels were more edible than we found them. There was not much reason to stick around San Luis, so we packed up the car and drove on to Carmel.

It’s a pretty dull drive through the backcountry of Monterey County, but you have to be careful because the CHP is around every hill and bend in the highway ready to issue speeding tickets. It seems like there’s more of King City than there used to be, but that’s not really a good thing. Santa Maria, Santa Rosa, and King City are all places whose sole redeeming quality was their smallness, but not even that is gone….

The GPS was quite useful here as it moved us through the somewhat intricate connection between Highway 101 and Highway 1. We have taken some wrong turns doing this by ourselves in the past. I programmed it to take us to Carmel City Beach, and we were there remarkably quickly.

Carmel Beach is probably my favorite place in the world to take the dog. It’s stunningly beautiful, no matter whether it is sunny or foggy, and it is perfectly legal to have a dog off-leash here. And this beach is always filled with the nicest and most well-bred dogs — of course, you’d expect no less in Carmel! Edie had a nice romp or two as we walked down the beach.

We met Dianne and Jim and their house. They too are having a lot of remodeling done in their garden right now, and it was pretty torn up. Dianne greeted us warmly, but her dogs checked out Edie a little too aggressively for her taste, and she gave me a pleading look like “Take me away from here! Please!” In a few minutes, though, all were friends, and she seemed to take a particular liking to Tucker.

We had a pleasant lunch at the Casanova Restaurant. We had suggested eating at the porch here because we had stumbled across it last year and found the atmosphere and the food quite good. Again, we had a fine meal here, and we managed to keep all the conversation off the bad topics like the war in Iraq.

We pulled out of Carmel around two o’clock and headed towards San Jose. We were making such good time that John decided that he should stop somewhere to nap and walk the dog. We tried to find a suitable place, looking first at a really bleak dog park in Scotts Valley, but never found it. We did get off the beaten path and drove along a really narrow road which paralleled Highway 19. It was pretty, and also pretty slow.

We arrived at Donna’s house around four. At first we thought that maybe nobody was home, but she answered to door with a big smile on her face. Her dog, Missy, was in the back yard and she was hesitant about introducing her to Edie because she had not done well with their last canine visitor. But John urged her to give it a try, and the two dogs were soon frolicking in the back.

She talked about her work as a middle-school librarian and the blessings and worries of being the mother of two adolescent girls. Megan is currently at Cal Poly, studying chemistry, and Katie will be starting her senior year of high school. She showed us some pictures of the two girls. Katie joined us. I remember her best as a young girl, and it was hard to suppress all those stupid “You’ve grown so big” comments that adults are prone to make at moments like this.

When George came home we chatted for a big then went off to a Japanese restaurant in a mall nearby. We had a decent dinner, and it was fun to catch up on how everybody was doing. We could have talked for longer — not dangerous topics to avoid with the Lydons — but we still had a while to go before settling in for the night in San Francisco so we said our goodbyes and hit the road.