Greetings from California! The (first, quick, lovely) Japan stopover was effortless - no significant timezone change so you hardly notice it. And the change at LAX to a little plane for the last stretch to San Diego afforded me views I've never had before of my childhood stomping ground.
Here - from the window of our plane! - is the view. Going north (up) past the Torrey Pines golf course (not part of the stomping ground) you reach Torrey Pines State Reserve (stomp), the beach (stomp, stomp) and above the lagoon, the little town Del Mar (stomp, stomp, stomp), home! I didn't like being from sunny California as a self-conscious nerdy boy - I bodysurfed rather than surfed in part because you can hide in the wave - but now I'm delighted to come home to it, or at least to this little stretch of it. (Del Mar is the home of this blog, too, which began here four months ago.)Considering I left Tokyo this evening at ten past five, it was especially sweet to have arrived in Del Mar in time for a walk with my parents on said beach before the sun set at 5:04. Looking west from just above where the lagoon meets the Pacific we saw the sunset above. The clouds give a wintry feel to it all, the red along the horizon - brighter than my photo conveys - warm like a distant fire. But I'm Australianized enough already to have been reminded by the gappy clouds in this picture of light shining through gum (eucalpyptus) trees. Now I'm really seeing things!
