Now you are three

Dear Seamus,

You turned three on the sixteenth, which we spent speeding through ghost towns on our way to Ely Nevada, to ride Engine No. 93 on the Nevada Northern Railway. No. 93 went into service in 1909 as an ore train from Ruby mine to McGill. We car-hopped a bit before settling in (as best as you can settle, my wee quicksilver dude) before spending most of the ride in the open  passenger car right behind the locomotive, coal car, and caboose, which meant we were covered in crisp black ash at the end. You also went garnet hunting with us, cowboy gear shopping, and we got a rare tour of the inside of a Union Pacific locomotive waiting for its dispatcher to tell it to leave Truckee with two miles of cargo. We showered you with toys on Saturday, and you got the rare treat of iPad movies on our loooong Sunday haul home.

It’s funny, the ride was meant to be the apex of the weekend, but we had our share of small adventures all weekend. This was our first trip with you since we drove to San Diego with Grandma and Poppy in the spring, and the difference in you is interesting. You can entertain yourself a bit now, but dislike being still for very long, and you hate being thwarted. You are curious and want to see and touch everything, and you know your desires and state them.

You’ve had some rough moments in the last couple of weeks. You’ve been denied treats not because of behavior, but due to circumstances we couldn’t control, and you’ve melted down for long, long tantrums. You’ve also been encouraged to look for things  and get things on your own when you are accustomed to having them pointed out to you or handed to you. I hate to tell you that your responses are ripe for a good old-fashioned ignoring, but I think you’re going to have to ride this stuff out a bit. We’ll guide you as best we can. You are so very sweet and friendly and funny when not having these developmental bumps, that I think that’s the essential you, and the rest of this is building your character skillsets.

Here’s to how all of this shakes out. I love you, little boy.

Mama

The mountain of laundry awaits and the dog needs a walk. But I love you, I’m so happy

The adventure, day three: San Simeon to San Luis Obispo

So last you heard, we were reverse-commuting with grey whales and watching paragliders as we wound through state parks and national forests to the Morgan Hotel with its big poofy bed and slightly swank/slightly funky vibe. Much rest was taken. And in the morning we bought tickets for touring one of the most ostentatious pieces of architecture I’ve visited since seeing La Sagrada Familia. Hearst Castle.

Wiliam Randolph Hearst’s ranch, which is how he thought of it and how much of it actually worked, is an estate so massive that there are six separate tours of the buildings and grounds, and we never bumped into another tour group. We took the recommended tour for first-time visitors, which seemed kinda blah in its description: wander through a guest house and part of the main house, as well as some of the gardens. But it was brilliant. The tour mimicked the experience of being Hearst’s guest, and brought us through beautiful gardens and past the outdoor pool, through one of the guests houses and more gardens leading up to the main house. Once inside, we were guided through as if it were a typical evening with Hearst and his mistress. It was fantastic, because they took what could have been a very dull tour and gave us all this intimate context (guest), but also because we were learning the intimate details as we went, it was also edged with the greedy curiousity I get when I travel abroad, and sometimes get from watching reality television, though that’s a cheap, crappy buzz. Like M&Ms compared with Joseph Schmidt (gone, alas, and missed).

The houses and grounds were completely jammed with art. Furniture, statues, tapestries, silver plate like he was Mr. Darcy at Pemberley, architectural details. Julia Morgan had the task of incorporating this century-spanning heap of mostly Mediterranean ephemera into a cohesive estate, and I do think she pulled it off. Even if the sculpture garden did scream “Drug Lord” a little bit. Fun fact: Hearst was a catalog shopper for approximately 90% of the pieces he acquired, so the provenance of his collection is pretty clean. Basically, he bought all of this stuff so it wouldn’t get the shit bombed out of it in World War II. He just didn’t know it.

The only disappointment? We never saw a zebra.

After the tour we at lunch in the massive visitor center, then plopped back into the car and made our way to San Luis Obispo. Seamus fought his nap, finally passing out as we got into town. We found our hotel and drove around for a bit. Patrick found a parking spot next to the Mission, so Patty, John, and I got out to walk around. Mission San Luis Obispo is still an active parish, and a Palm Sunday mass was being held as we walked around the buildings to the chapel and listened to part of the service before walking through the gardens. Lovely, and a nice oasis just off of the main drag, but the poor roses were eaten alive by aphids. Someone send ladybugs to the rectory, please. Seamus woke up five minutes before we returned to the car, so it was on foot exploring and dinner before heading back up to the hotel. Seamus was hell bent on getting into the unheated pool, but we persuaded him to hang out in the hot tub instead and cook off some energy.

The adventure, day two: Monterey to San Simeon

We woke up late and got ourselves out the hotel and back on the road to Monterey (we stayed in a Hyatt in Marina, about half an hour away). Patrick made a wrong turn somewhere that took us around the back end of one of the military installations, which bloomed with poppies and lupine while farmers worked strawberry fields across the road.

Our plan was to try fitting in the Monterey Bay Aquarium, 17-Mile Drive, and Mission Carmel before continuing south. I wanted to get as much kid-friendly stuff as possible in each day, and hoped that we could do the aquarium before nap, have him nap on the way to Carmel, see the mission, and then run down the coast, with possible running around stops as we drove through Big Sur. John had never been to the aquarium, and Seamus hadn’t been since he was very very small. I love the place and kick myself whenever we go for not going more often, despite the four hours in the car a day trip would require. The aquarium represents the bay it rests on and the deeper offshore ocean waters, and they do a pretty good job at showing not only the “pretty” fish, but the fish that made up the local economy for so long: herring and sardines. Cannery Row now offers tourist schlock and restaurants of varying tastiness, but it’s still Steinbeck country.

The aquarium was fantastic - aside from the usual exhibits, they had a whole installation devoted to sea horses, including tanks of them in various stages of the reproductive cycle. The biggest hit, of course, were the jellyfish.

Seamus and Patty, aka Grandma.And of course on the day my eyes were the most sensitive from the pink eye there were sea otters out in the bay right off the terrace. Lucky were the divers who were out there that day.

We grabbed some burritos and I nursed Seamus down, and we tooled around Monterey and Pacific grove for a while ooh-ing and ahh-ing over cute little houses and nice-looking libraries and schools. I keep telling myself that we probably can’t afford to move and the area is probably plagued with shitty API scores so I don’t explode into tears. No, I will not confirm that. My remaining sane enough to live in our tiny space requires a certain amount of blinkering about other places right now.

Seamus slept through 17-Mile Drive and we began poking our way southerly. On our way down we stopped to watch a group of paragliders ride thermals near Big Sur to plunk back onto Earth at a state beach. “Seamus, look, those people are flying!” Do you any other way to distract a toddler from your breasts while riding in the back seat of an Outback?  If so, let’s have a contest.

We stopped in Gorda for dinner and watched migrating grey whales swim north. And our day ended in the town of San Simeon, where Patty booked us at the rather quite awesome Morgan at San Simeon. Julia Morgan was a local architect who desigened several buildings in Berkeley, the Campanil at Mills College, and this ranch house for William Randall Hearst. Because of the Campanil I have a soft spot for Ms Morgan, plus I’ve visited the vault at Cal’s Department of Architecture and seen some of the hand-drawn elevations in their collection (not hers, but still). The detail of the work - all hand drawn - still blows me away. I fuck up stick figures. So I was happy happy happy to see the hotel festooned with high-resolution scans of her drawings of Hearst Castle, framed like fine art prints. Another point of happiness was the big big bed.

The adventure, part one: San Francisco to Monterey

On the last Friday in March we packed up the Subaru with Seamus, Patrick’s folks Patty and John (aka Grandma and Poppy), and Patrick and I, and we trucked down to Monterey. I’m going to apologize now for the dearth of pictures. Seamus had croup the week before we left, and gave it to me (such a sweet boy), so I had it during the entire trip, as well as viral pink eye for a few days. I spent the days on Sudafed, which cleared up my head while Motrin kept my throat from swelling, but I haven’t taken that much stuff at once in over three years, with the exception of my labor meds. I think the pseudoephedrine made me a little spacey. So not a lot of pics.

During the day Patty and John hung out with Shea while I plowed through paperwork and packed up the dog and toddler, washed dishes, and got the cat’s stuff ready for Cody so he could just walk in and feed her. (Faolan stayed at his house and was spoiled rotten.) Patrick came home with take-out, we finished packing, shoved everyone into the car, and off we went. The plan was to get clear of the Bay Area after commute traffic, and start the trip Saturday morning in a vacation locale.

Seamus was less than thrilled about going into the car in his jammies, when he ought to be nursing down for the night. “Where are we going?” he’d ask, and when we’d tell him, “No, I can’t”. Once he decided he could, then he couldn’t do anything else, including sleep. “I’m on an adventure.” He passed out about an hour into the drive, after I croaked through his night-night story and song, and an hour before we hit our hotel in Marina, just outside of Monterey. We crawled into our rooms, passed out, and woke the next morning ready to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Next up: Monterey to San Simeon

The adventure as abstract

Ten days of travel

Two Missions

One Castle

Fifteen-ish towns

Many French fries

Lots of coast

Ditto trees

One toddler

Two grandparents

Mama and Dada

And uncounted ranks of animals, wild, captive, and post-taxidermy.