Family Vices February 1. - 11., 2003 Nobody's perfect, so let us confess to our sins

	Elephant seal this is how Californians enjoy life by the ocean...

You have certainly noticed our small vices and deviations. Besides Hippo's affinity towards food, we crave trips, balloons, taking pictures, and internet.

It's not hard to satisfy our first desire. Just jump into our Wagon and off we go. Moreover, February is a great month for trips along our local coast. Summer foggy inversions seem to have become a music of a distant past. Hills turn green, ocean lashes out during Spring storms, and sunsets are decorated with pretty clouds. Once the air clears up, one can see far. This is the ideal time to visit Point Reyes.

	This is how it looks if you lift up a balloon's skirt

Unfortunately, a caring management of the park had decided that they needed to dramatically improve their service, which means closing the park to all visitors' motorized vehicles, and introducing a bus shuttle taking tourists to a lighthouse a back (for a surcharge, of course). We did not feel like waiting for the next bus, nor would we look forward to the prospect of squeezing among a packed crowd of other visitors while being limited by a bus schedule. Therefore we omitted the lighthouse and opted for a walk along the coast. As usual, all we had to do was to ascend a few dozen feet up a hill, and we were suddenly left by ourselves in the midst of a beautiful day. A hundred yards below, surf licked a narrow beach at a foot of a cliff, and the sun tried to bake us extra crispy. A large elephant seal wallowed on the sand -- we don't know if he was being sick, or wanted to show off, but he stayed there in the midst of a human crowd, while we hiked back down from the cliff to take a picture.

	A view from a balloon over Morgan Hill looking towards San Jose. Highway 101 below.

Our luck with weather continued into the following week. On Saturday at seven a.m. we rattled our teeth with cold in Morgan Hill during a classical, winter frosty sunrise, while helping to unpack a balloon named Alpenglow. This time, Jeanne and Tom had no clients to fly, so I got to fly on the first hop, and Sid took an all-men's ride with Tom later. Naturally, the boys had to fly higher and farther, and for all I know, their most important piloting event was spitting at the ground (out of completely legitimate reasons, that is, to determine the direction of winds at levels below the current balloon altitude).

	Tom our fearless and shameless pilot

By that time, our married life has already been ruined for several days. One of my virtual friends suggested a page, where amateur photographers go to share their pictures and to mercilessly criticize and rate pictures of others. Sid posted his first image there on Thursday and then spent a whole evening clicking and watching how he earned points. I managed to get him to bed by ten thirty, but around midnight he jumped up again and stayed glued to the monitor until two. I joined him, due to a popular demand, on Friday.

I know, it's really rather self-inflicted, especially as all those utter amateurs are sometimes unable to properly appreciate our perfect pictures! Granted, we may be somewhat different from a stereotypical picture-taker, being more tourists than artists, for we try to enjoy what's happening around us, and then we also take pictures, while a notorious photographer keeps returning for days and weeks to the same spot, waiting for the exactly right light and feeling, spends hours arranging one dried thistle next to a piece of peeling paint, alternatively forcing some poor shivering, sneezing nude maiden to twist into anatomically impossible contraption in a howling storm or something like that.

All in all, we have received a lot of good advice and comments, and it gave us a feeling that our pictures have finally found some wider audience.

Copyright © 2003-2005 by Carol & Sid Paral. All rights reserved.