San Diego--Clarion and Beyond

Here's a slideshow of our San Diego trip, with a few highlights below. (To access the captions, just click in the lower third of the screen.)After hiking in the mountains, we looked like this:Prior to that: Went hiking for many miles into remote mountain areas around San Diego. It was pristine and post-apocalyptic up there, like being on the surface of the moon, only with trees. It was hard to breathe at times from the heat and dust. We saw a fox. And a coyote. The coyote just stood there and measured us up and we walked past it daunted, and into cougar country. Into ravines and fire-ravaged landscapes where all the trees were black and the trails were basically made of soot. Hawks overhead. The smell of fire. And at one point, when we were in an area of meadows and gnarled bushes, there was a kind of presence, a sound of something big moving through the underbrush behind us, and we had no idea what it was and I have to be honest I was scared shitless, thinking we were in The Hills Have No Eyes or Lovecraft country. But nothing came out from the underbrush and we got back okay. But it was a hell of an experience.Amazing scenery:Before that, we were teaching at Clarion. Who could possibly be listening to this old fart pontificate? Not Peter Atwood! Who could blame him?Nathaniel and Shweta (student), before the Mysterious Galaxy reading. Everybody say "awww."Here I bore 30 people to death by reading from the Tallahassee phone book:Beautiful beach scene with my cutie:Torrey Pines, just gorgeous:Ann, grandson, and Jango, the cat who guards my brain, all of us finally home: