See Kelly at the beach

We went out to Ventura Beach after breakfast today. It was about 1.5 hours from The AV with no traffic to speak of. The trip brings you through some productive-looking farms in a pristine valley. It was a toasty, dry 95 degrees in The AV, and 69 on the beach. The water was cool, but people were swimming. Baywatch-style lifeguard stations were stationed every few hundred meters.





Then we went for a drive into the mountains and found several surprises! One was that Kelly is scared to death of windy mountain roads along cliff edges. We needed The Jaws of Life to pry her fingers out of the center console and the door handle.

This is what I think of California.



I'm not really doing what you think I'm doing. This is not that sort of website. But this one is. Just kidding. I just linked to CNN.

So anyway,  then, as if windy roads weren't enough, we wound up in the midst of a wild fire. Yeah, really.



Bucket chopters, firefighters, and roads that were being closed all around us.



It may have been my imagination, but the area still felt warm to me. I think it probably just burned last night. The acrid smell of charcoal and smoke was heavy in the air. Very eerie.



That's about the height of Whiteface Mountain. We eventually topped out at 5100 feet. That's pretty high for a road by NY State standards. Here it is barely noteworthy. I know that the highway that ran past the Mountain Warfare Training Center base camp in Bridgeport, CA was over 6000 feet. And a nearby, there was a mountain called 9494. Guess how high that peak was?