Light on the water

A pleasant day out with the flower_cat. Our stick-in-the-mud daughters seem to have little interest in art museums, long drives, and seafood restaurants. Their loss, and it's cheaper.

We started by taking advantage of our family membership in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to get us in to the Monet in Normandy exhibit at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Drove up I280, as usual. Had lunch at the museum cafe (tasty, though not particularly cheap) -- I had the halibut, and the Cat had the antipasto plate. Then went to the Monet exhibit.

The light! There were some astounding seascapes. I was struck by one in particular, of a beach with stones showing darkly through the receding tail of a wave. Walk a few feet closer and it all disolves into disconnected brushstrokes. There were some fantastic views of waves that the flower_cat particularly liked. And the waterlilies, of course. Dropped about $80 in the museum bookstore. Dangerous places, those bookstores. Afterwards, upstairs, there were three rooms of Rodin sculptures. Rooms with walls of white marble, bathed in light. (Some of my favorites, but not all. Between the Legion of Honor and the Stanford museum thirty miles south in Palo Alto, I can see most of them.

We drove back along the coast on Route 1. The Devil's Slide section, between Pacifica and Half Moon Bay, was just reopened last week. I caught a few glimpses of the sea below the cliffs, dark blue and filled with sailboats. Not quite the colors of Monet's paintings, but real enough.

Sixty miles or so down the coast, we headed East from Santa Cruz on Highway 9, winding up through the redwoods past Felton, Ben Lomond, Big Basin, and down past Skyline Drive into Saratoga. All told, a pleasant three hour trip -- it only took one hour going up, but wasn't nearly as pretty.

The kids had no interest in a "fancy" seafood restaurant, so we went by ourselves to the Yankee Pier in nearby Satan's Santana Row. It's dangerously close to a kitchen-gadget store called Sur la Table, so of course we went in, coming out with a pyrex measuring cup (replacing the one that broke a couple of months ago), an OXO jar opener, and a large Kyocera vegetable peeler. Mangos are cheap this month.