Wow, what an eventful but totally unplanned weekend. On Saturday, Steve and I drove across the golden gate bridge and up to the top of Hawk Hill in the Marin Headlands and just sat at the top, looking down at the city, the bay, and the Golden Gate bridge, and enjoying the crystal-clear, beautiful weather. All kinds of wildflowers were blooming, especially brilliant orange california poppies, and I was torn between looking at the hillside and looking at the view!

As we headed back down we stopped to read all the sign-boards about the various military installments built into the hill, and then Steve happened to remember the Marine Mammal Rehabilitation Center nestled up in the hill, so we visited that too. We watched them training underweight elephant seal pups (rescued from various beaches in the area) how to swallow fish. For those of you who have never heard a baby elephant seal vocalize, let me tell you, these things don't roar or bark -- they literally squawk, the most gravely, high-pitched squawk you can imagine coming from a sea creature!!

Since we were over there, we decided to stop in and see Sausalito -- a very cute area -- and then Steve also remembered an exhibit his Dad had taken him to many moons ago -- a working scale model of the tidal forces for the entire bay area. (Unfortunately, there's only one image on the website and it conveys absolutely no sense of the thing...but if you're curious, here's the website.) Imagine yourself in a giant warehouse filled mostly with shallow chlorine pools (about waist high). Now imagine that those chlorine pools were cut into the shape of all of the bays in the bay area, and that the bottoms of them were filled or dug-out to mimic the actual underwater topography of each area. Visitors walk on the 'landmass' part of the exhibit (you can stand at the tip of San Francisco, for example) and can look out into the pools, which have all the bridges represented, all the towns labeled, and are used to determine how building bridges or dams or digging channels for shipping or what have you might affect the bay area.

It was pretty darn interesting for the first 10 minutes and then you got the gist of it!! But it was still cool to see.

We headed home and spent a low-key night preparing for our whale watch on Sunday -- which was then canceled due to anticipated thunderstorms. Bummer!! So we decided to make it 'home improvement day,' and trundled off to Lowes to buy odds and ends for pet projects we'd been wanting to do for ages. By the end of the day, we managed to morph our second bedroom space into what we can actually call a respectable 'den,' rather than 'room full of boxes and books with a desk that you can't really use for all the crap that's on it.' (~i_i)

It was a busy but satisfying weekend, especially in that we didn't plan a single moment of it!!