10/8/2010 - What did we do yesterday?

Sorry about no blog last night. I was just way too sleepy. We spent the evening having dinner with some new friends on s/v Odessa, their Tashiba 40. Mike and Nita are from Seattle and we met them through our mutual friends Bob & Sherry on s/v Ponderosa. We had a very nice visit comparing notes (they are also headed to Mexico) on equipment, tactics, plans, backgrounds, etc. Afterwards, like a couple of yoyos, we returned to the boat and watched our shows (currently: Mad Men, Deadwood, and Twentysixmiles). We were both nodding through Deadwood but rallied for Twentysixmiles. But after that, it was straight to bed.

So, other than dinner on Odessa, what did we do yesterday?

Well, after breakfast we dinghied to the Pleasure Pier (aka "The Green Pier") to use the shoreside facilities. Then, as it wasn't raining yet and my knee was feeling some better, we took a walk out to the ferry dock. As I was setting the pace, "amble" would probably be a more accurate description than "walk". While watching Twentysixmiles, which was filmed at Avalon, we've seen a few places that we weren't completely familiar with. And, since Avalon is very small it's easy to ferret out these places. The ferry dock was one. We continued walking past the ferry dock to Lover's Cove. It's a nature preserve or something like that where no swimming, diving, boating, etc. is allowed. From the road the water was very clear and it was easy to see the ubiquitous Garibaldies, mostly because they're so bright.

Afterwards, we walked to the other end of the bay and a little beyond. On the show they often showed people sitting at a beachside bar that we hadn't seen before. So, we walked past the Casino to the Descanso Beach Club and found the bar as well as a pretty cool little enclave. On the way, as we were walking along the path to the casino, I just had to take photos of some of the tile scenes embedded in the wall along the walkway.

Also took a few photos of some amazing tile work on the Casino itself:

This town is absolutely lousy with artistic tile work.

All this walking around observing stuff made me want to go back to the boat and watch the video we bought about Catalina ("Hollywood's Magical Island") just in case it led us to explore other facets of Avalon. So, it being a fairly dreary day, anyway, that's exactly what we did. The video was pretty fascinating and told us lots of stuff we didn't know. Like the fact that the theater in the Casino was the first theater anywhere that was built specifically to show "talkies" and consequently, many of them premiered here.

After the video, it was still dreary out so I suggested we ("we" being Lulu) pop some corn and watch a movie. Maybe the sun would be out when it was over. So we watched The Great Santini since we'd both recently read the book. By the time it was over, the sun was indeed out. We gathered our stuff and started ashore to take showers which is when Mike from Odessa caught up with us and invited us to dinner.

And that was pretty much our day.

Today I have a list of chores (none very daunting) that I've been putting off. It's time to do them so I don't wait until the last minute and they become more onerous than they really are. We're planning on heading out on Thursday sometime. We're paid up through Thursday night but checkout time is 9 AM. If we left then, it would put us in San Diego at Oh-Dark-Thirty. If we leave on Thursday we can leave whenever we want and plan our trip to arrive in SD in the daylight.

You can check the webcam occasionally on Thursday to see if we've left yet. Zoom in on "Beach" and look for us in the lower right hand corner just to starboard of the shore boat (the one with a yellow top).