Foxy - unguided missile with the mentality of a three-year-old child.

After an intense trip we planned to slack and recover. I got, however, contacted by Foxy's owner, whether I would like to come and check her out. I had to abandon Foxy in the fall, when I began working and realized that I would not have the time to be in charge of a dominant mare. Still I was happy to visit and see that Foxy still looks great, in good health and full of energy. At the same time I confirmed that there is (still) no space in my life for an unguided missile with the mentality of a rebellious, three year old child — after all, I have my two children and Hippo.

We had visitors coming on the following week. About a year back, I ran into Tomáš in an internet chat-room — I had not seen him some seventeen years; we used to climb together sometimes back then, but we were half of the state apart and there were no cell phones and e-mails. We had simply lost track. Meanwhile the separation increased to half of planet — that is, until the moment a little more than a year ago. When Tomáš had written that he was going with his wife and some friends on a sightseeing tour from San Francisco to Denver, I invited him "to have coffee" with us. As usual these situation are always a gamble — you don't have a clue what the other party would be like, and if it would work out or not.

Visitors were bound to admire lady bugs on Borel Hill.

In the end we agreed that I would pick up Tomáš, Šárka and Žaneta (her husband could not come along for job-related reasons) at the airport; they would stay one night at our house and we would see. I even recognized Tomáš at the airport; some people don't change much. I dragged the whole expedition to Borel Hill — partially for geographically-sightseeing reasons, but also out of mild selfishness: an organism shocked by a time shift needs to be exposed to sunshine and TIRED, to sleep well at night and refrain from shuffling around our house. To my surprise, they did not object at all, and instead we tacked Castle Rock to it. Then time had come for a Vietnamese dinner; having had a fresh experience with the miserable airline fodder, noodle soup is best.

On Thursday I dragged our visitor early in the morning to Point Lobos; we covered all we could, spotted otters and visited a whaling museum. Then I had to run to the school for my children — on my way I dropped the expedition at San Juan with the plan that they could see the Mission and the famous San Andreas Fault on their own. I loaded kids and we rushed back to San Juan to fetch our visitors. It began to look rather critical in one moment — traffic on the freeway suddenly stopped for good — no jumping and hoping to get better. Fortunately only a bit ahead of us, there was an on-ramp — so I took the ditch to reach it and backed up the ramp (in the wrong direction, just like dozens of other cars) to a byway and using it, I somehow got to San Juan.

Tomáš and Šárka at Point Lobos.

On account of time pressure, I had denied Žaneta a visit to a lighthouse in Monterey. To recover my reputation of a skillful local guide (and also to stay away from the havoc of the still-clogged freeway), we made a detour to Santa Cruz. The local lighthouse is probably less interesting than the one we missed, but then again we could watch surfers shivering on the edge of our cold Pacific ocean, despite their neoprene suits.

And since our visitor had thus seen the California Coast, a Mission, the San Andreas Fault, and a lighthouse, we finished it off by a quick interpretive loop in a redwood park in Felton. My children, however, wanted to splash in the river there, and so I only led our guests to the entrance to the grove, and focused on watching over my offspring myself.

It was not obvious, but on that day I had driven 270 miles — or 430 kilometers — and was rather worn out in the evening. I really appreciated when Tomáš bought some meat and my Hippo threw it on our grill, while I was able to sit down and finally have a beer. Somewhere around the beer we started going through plans for Friday — it came up that our guests had planned to get to San Francisco on Friday, check into a hotel, tour the City, sleep, and on Saturday go to a rental company to fetch a reserved RV, taking off with it on their trip. So far it would make sense. It ceased when we began to look at a map of San Francisco — and most of all, the reservation of the wretched motor-home. Yes, the pick up label said San Fran, but the street address claimed Dublin — i.e. some forty miles, or one Bay and one mountain range, to the east of the City!

The otter has a stone on its belly, and uses it to smash clams.

So we had canceled the hotel in San Francisco and decided that they could see the city on Friday, with just a backpack, minus the large luggage, and return to our house to sleep, and I would take them to Dublin on Saturday, as I would drive to Kirkwood. The skiing season had ended quite resolutely in mid-April, and even the lifts were all standing still, on this last official weekend — but it was necessary to drive to the "cabin", pack and take home all our stuff, and do an end-of-season cleaning. It was clear that I would go alone, as the rest of the family would be bored and only get in my way.

In the end the situation turned out completely different — I got an opportunity to climb near Kirkwood with Pavel on Saturday, so I said goodbye to our guests in the morning, leaving them at Hippo's mercy, while I sped off to the mountains. Hippo took the whole expedition to visit the historic aircraft carrier USS Hornet, which was a success, even with Lisa. They were scheduled to rent the RV at one o'clock p.m., but it got delayed, for as Žaneta tried running water in the motor-home's sink, a faulty water pump began splashing the whole vehicle. Hippo had to make a scene to force the rental clerks to furnish a new RV, with which the pilgrims could finally, four hours later, drive away.

USS Hornet.

Meanwhile, I had reached Kirkwood as planned, and could only sadly overlook bald slopes and meadows. Pavel and I climbed near Woodfords, only a few miles away, wearing t-shirt. Sunday followed with a bothersome job of moving all things into our wagon. I counted on skis, boots, helmets, bed covers, our mattress and winter clothing. I did not realize how many little things had amassed in the "cabin" in the space of the five months. Durable food that we did not finish eating (as we practically had not skied in April), a DVD player, a teapot, soaps and shampoos and cleaning supplies, a bag of gloves, hats and so on. Vendula kept running out to me, yelling "this must be yours too!", giving me one thing after another. It seemed almost impossible, but I eventually did drive back home — Central Valley temperatures were in the nineties Fahrenheit (thirties Celsius) and I had the impression that our wagon's air conditioning was not working much, but it took me another week before I figured that it really was not right, and the car would need another visit at Tony's.

Broomsticks are obsolete, we fly on torpedoes now.

In the midst of it I had learned that my other climbing buddy, Rob, had fallen down in Yosemite on Sunday and now was in a hospital, awaiting spine surgery. I had offered him to drive him home from the hospital, which fell on Saturday. No, I did not imagine driving up to the entrance, Rob jumping in and that would be it; still our dealings with the hospital exceeded my worst expectations. Some situations were rather absurd — I don't know why it had to be ME who had to pick up Rob's medication at the pharmacy (inside the hospital), why a nurse could not do that. The pharmacist studied the prescription importantly and began asking me, first the name of the patient. I knew that. Alas, his date of birth and address was not something I had memorized. Eventually she accepted his phone number (stored in my cell phone). Having completed my first mission assignment, I moved on to the next — the hospital protocol required me to learn how to change Rob's bandages. I protested that I was a mere taxicab driver, and did not want to have anything to do with his five inch scar. No avail — I had to be present at the demonstration of the change of his wound dressing. Eventually the hospital machine had disgorged the by then totally exhausted Rob, and I could take him to his place — about one hour before more friends of his were supposed to come and help him rearrange his apartment so that he could live there with a walker.

While I was cleaning out Kirkwood, the rest of our family went whale-watching in Monterey.

Meanwhile Hippo was attempting to assemble our new patio furniture — we had gotten rid of our dysfunctional back yard hot tub last year, and thus we finally had room for somewhat larger table and six chairs for our mini-lot. It would seem that a lesser hassle fell on Hippo than me with the hospital, but then our Chinese comrades would have to have welded on the fourth table leg, instead of just gluing it on with paint. The result was, we met by one thirty for lunch, both relatively tired from the tasks that only a few hours ago seemed trivial, but had gotten uncomfortably heavy by then. In the end we returned the table twice (as another leg had fallen apart), but by five o'clock it was standing and we were ready to welcome our first visitors. Finally we could all sit down in comfort and have room on the table for food and drinks at the same time.

A test flight.

The fact that our skiing has ended, caused us to suddenly have much free time on the weekends. We usually go biking somewhere, discovering our local bike trails. After all the kids had grown too big to ride in playgrounds, and we need a larger space. We had, for example, checked out a route in the south of the Valley, which leads by a ranch with horses, and that makes Lisa protest our biking a bit less.

On the third weekend in May, an aircraft museum in San Martin, next to the South County airport, holds an annual Wings of History Fly-in. It traditionally includes tethered balloon flights, and so we got up on Saturday at five fifteen and sped off to the south. Besides the pilots of Rubik, Jennifer a Michael, our former pilot Jeanne came from Dakota. Somewhat later, Martin, Rumiko and Bryce arrived and all joined in working around the balloon. The children also tried to help and earned a "test flight" and subsequently occasional room in the basket with smaller groups of clients. I am pleased with the pilots taking the kids and their help seriously. I think it is a good lesson about when you want something, you have to try hard and work for it.

The wind had picked up, and flying is over.

When the wind had picked up and the tethered rides for the public ended, we received a breakfast, and stumbled around the airport for a while — Tom followed his tradition to put together balsa glider plane, Lisa hung around the assembly tables, playing with cut-off pieces of light wood and watched square dance demo. By then we were all pretty tired and time had come to head back home and to our beds.

On Sunday we got up even fifteen minutes earlier (i.e. at 5 a.m.) and drove back to the airport — this time to assist with a real balloon launch and subsequent chase. Tom was disappointed, for he did not fly this time, but Jennifer was teaching a new pilot and one does not take passengers in that case. Instead of picnic, we were invited to a breakfast at a diner; Tom had ordered pancakes as expected, but Lisa asked for an egg and bacon, and really enjoyed it. It's interesting how our petite girl is such a carnivore, while Tom turned after his mother and demands sweet pastries in the morning.

We arranged with Jennifer that we would join their crew during a ballooning get-together at Prosser Lake — last year we somehow did not make it and the balloonists are simply too nice lunatics to let them disappear from our life. So we intend to keep this hobby. During the most recent year I had the opportunity to meet an array of my old friends, some of them I have not seen for many years — and that's a shame, for there are never too many good people around.