After the Sonoma valley, it was off to the Sonoma coast. For us, that was a drive down Rt116 through the Russian River valley, which mixes vineyards, river and giant redwoods. For example, here's a pair of medium-sized trees in the Armstrong Redwoods park. These weren't the biggest trees in the park, by a long shot, but this shot gives a better sense of scale than any of the others we took (Mrs. Cleek took this, of me):

Then, after another 15 minutes of driving, we hit the fog, and then, we reached... the beach:

The water was actually about 30 feet in from of Mrs C.. But, the fog and a little dip in elevation obscured the breaking waves from where I took that shot. Looks better without it, IMO.

A seal was bobbing around in the water, watching us watch it from the beach. He evaded my camera. This guy didn't:

By the way, if you want to know kind of image is the hardest for JPEG to handle, the starfish shot is it - no smooth solid colors, lots of small contrasty details.

There was beach, and there was rock and cliff:

That's quite a change from the NC coast, which is pretty much completely sandy beach, with houses lined-up as far as you can see, right up to the dunes. The little stretch of the Sonoma coast that we saw felt barren by comparison: scattered farm houses with a few vacation cottages here and there.

We did one night at a resort in the little wisp of a town called Bodega Bay, where the Alfred Hitchcock movie, The Birds, was filmed, and where I somehow managed to get insanely drunk (I'm guessing it was the hot tub, since I really didn't drink much more than anyone else I was with). Yay!

Then the drive back to San Fran, to catch our planes. Here's the church from The Birds, in the town of Tomales:

And, after 8 hours sitting in the SF airport, here's L.A. at night:

That's the moon, up in the corner. Those greasy, plastic airplane windows really suck for taking night shots.

And that's that.