Butterfly Beach, Santa Barbara yesterday and Caltech today

I'll write more about the beach later but this was a nice shot from our time there yesterday evening in Santa Barbara.

Today we drove to Caltech in Pasadena. The campus looked deceptively plain on the edges but once you walk into the campus proper it gets very magestic and yet friendly and navigable. Definitely in my top three campuses with Berkeley and UC-Santa Cruz.

My big excitement of the day was getting to meet Sean Carroll after my son's meeting with him. I've been reading his books about physics for the past couple of years and just started his newest, The Big Picture, which I'm loving. He's a terrific writer and a nice person. 

Meanwhile, the heat is rising in this part of the state. It's 93 today, 97 tomorrow, 101 on Sunday, and a whopping 105 on Monday, which will make it very easy to get up at 5 a.m. and head to the airport to fly home to November Hill. (Husband tells me it will be 95 there by Tuesday, but the air will be clean and I will have horses to hose!!) Temps are a bit milder in LA where son will be so hopefully he will start his summer research with ease.

Santa Barbara - a quick stop

We rolled into Santa Barbara last night after a beautiful drive down the Pacific coast highway through Monterey, Big Sur, Cambria, and then inland via 154, which was spectacular too. Horse farms, many huge fields of hay being baled, and mountains dotted with green trees which made me feel like I was driving in a novel. Not sure which one! But it was lovely.

Today we went to UC-Santa Barbara campus and I spent some time in the library. One side looks to the mountains, the other to the Pacific. It's quite a place. 

We went to the beach this evening and are now spending our last night here before heading out early tomorrow for Pasadena and Caltech.

The days are winding down for me - one more campus to go before I leave dear son at UCLA for the summer. I have enough photos and material to write weeks of blog posts when I get home! It's been a wonderful trip.

UC-Santa Cruz day 2 and end of day beach visit

Another great day on the UC-Santa Cruz campus. While dear son met with physics department faculty and grad students I wandered the campus and checked out libraries, the arboretum, and the biology building, where a recent graduate gave me a tour of the specimen collection. Drawers and drawers  and cupboards full of preserved specimens of every kind of bird imaginable. 

She spent nearly two hours with me letting me see all the birds they have. It was such a treat to see the collection but also a treat to meet a young woman so enthralled with her studies. She reminded me of my own two young adults. 

We ended the day with a walk at Natural Bridges State Beach. It was beautiful. Tomorrow we head down the coast to Santa Barbara.

University of California-Santa Cruz - love love love!

We visited the campus at UCSC today and I love it. It's a bit outside the main part of town and as you approach it looks almost like a high prairie, with the Santa Cruz mountains in the distance on one side and the Pacific in the distance on the other. The campus itself is set into a forest and it feels like a state park with academic buildings tucked deep into the trees.

I'll have more photos to share later but for now this is a quick glimpse. 

I also met and had lunch with an old online friend who I've known since dear son was a wee infant. It was fun to sit and talk with her and catch up on the kids plus get lots of info about the area. 

A good day and more tomorrow. I'm ready to apply to graduate school again myself! Marine biology? That was something I thought of at one point in my young life.

On to Santa Cruz

We spent a quiet day in Palo Alto yesterday, in a terrific little place called Creekside Inn which had very well-appointed rooms and balconies that were both private and lush with trees and bird song. We were there two nights and although minutes away from Stanford and shopping/dining it felt like we were in a little nook of forest somewhere.

Today we checked out at noon and headed to Santa Cruz via a stunning drive from Palo Alto to a few miles north of Pescadero. We passed a huge and gorgeous horse park and a number of horse farms, were behind a truck carrying about 50 bales of nice-looking hay for awhile, and then ended up on a gorgeous curving road that wound through redwoods and eventually opened up to golden, grassy hills.

We finally came to a stop sign at the Pacific Ocean! We turned left onto Highway 1 and for 35 or so miles scenes like the above were to our right. Gorgeous drive and now we're checked in and ready for grad school meetings at UC-Santa Cruz tomorrow and Tuesday. 

I have so many photos to share. I'll get them up at some point in a series of posts. I actually might have time tomorrow with dear son in meetings. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, very happy to be back in the old stomping ground. I used to come do laundry and buy groceries and books and coffee in Santa Cruz when I lived in Los Gatos years ago!