M&M Midge Report

Those "no-see-ums" we encountered in Florida turn out to be Culicoides furens, otherwise known as biting midges. According to this research, the midges are most common in the mangrove swamps and salt marshes of the Florida coast, and only the females bite, mostly at dusk and dawn -- the prime camping time and the exact location for a couple of milky white, Hiassen-esque tourists like Michelle and me to show up at Pennekamp State Park.

Female midges use the blood they suck to produce eggs, with each "blood meal" responsible for between 50 and 110 eggs. So, given my rough estimate of 80 bites on me, and guessing Michelle has about the same, M&M are conservatively responsible for at least 8,000 of these little buggers entering the world.

For that I apologize to the present and future "wimp" campers in Florida, as our friend Donna called us.

A week later, and I'm itchier and buggier than I was when they bit me.

Santa Barbara to L.A.

A few stray shots from yesterday's relaxing and pretty day.

We woke up in the Excellent Element at the beautiful El Capitan State Beach just north of Santa Barbara. This was the place Michelle booked for us online. It was as lovely as advertised and, at $25 a night, quite the bargain. There were a few other campers there, some sitting around a fire, others running a generator to power the TV inside their RVs. But it was clean and quiet, a four-glioma campground.


We got in after dark on Monday, flashlighted our way down to this nice beach just beyond our campsite and enjoyed a simple but perfect dinner: a second turkey sandwich from Pete's in San Francisco and a Red Hook beer from the Element-powered mini-fridge.


We continued driving down the 101 toward LA, but detoured to Ojai, as I mentioned yesterday, and jumped onto the free wireless at the nice little Ojai Coffee Roasting Co.


Entering Los Angeles, we left the 101 for the first time since downtown San Francisco and merged onto the 405, our "home" freeway, or one of them, when we lived here.

Then we headed straight for a little reunion at Kaye's in Belmont Shore (that's in Long Beach, for you non-Californians), and later had dinner with Kaye and Val at El Torito's, one of our old hangs.

Yet another very fun day.

Pie in the Sky II stats so far: Days 4, Excellent Days 4.

Blow, hump and tail

Right, sounds like a typical Friday night in college. But actually, those were the bywords we were given today as we kept an eye out for gray whales in Puget Sound. Michelle's mom Freda is in town, visiting from New Orleans, and we took her this morning for a four-hour whale-watching tour out of Everett, 45 minutes or so north of here.


When we got to the dock -- with only a minute to spare thanks to some unusually heavy traffic in Seattle -- we were greeted by a nice young woman in a dark green and black Gore-Tex jacket. Her intro was the Northwest equivalent of a SoCal restaurant server's:

"Hello, I'm Kate and I'll be your naturalist today!"

OK then, let's go!

Our tour boat, the Island Explorer 3, puttered around the shores of Whidbey, Hat and Camano islands for a couple of hours with Kate, on a loudspeaker, masking the absence of any whales by pointing out some seabirds -- her favorite is the double-crested cormorant -- and a few very cool California Sea Lions, including one that we saw chomping into a salmon he had just caught. Very Mutual of Omaha-y.

This sightseeing company, Island Adventures, guarantees that you'll see a whale on the tour, though, and Captain Mike seemed none to eager to give in without a hit. Finally he said he had received word that some grays were 10-15 minutes from our location, and he opened the throttle.

When we got there, sure enough, a group of three of these massive animals were surfacing frequently -- first a plume of vapor and water, followed by a good long view of its humped, barnacled back as it rolled through the water and then, once or twice, a glimpse of its tail, or fluke. We were close enough to hear them exhale and to smell their rank breath. Pretty spectacular, really.

We had to laugh at Kate, though, who was really into her job and couldn't contain her enthusiasm for the whales. At one point she was describing how remarkably aware they are of their own enormous bodies -- 45 feet long, as much as 3,000 pounds -- "and remember," she said, "they're living in a three-dimensional world while ours is only two-dimensional."

My stomach begs to differ; it's getting more 3-D every day.

Michelle took some great pictures of the whales, and I'm sure she'll post some soon. I just wanted to give a quick report with a couple of snapshots.

Chilly out there, though not as cold as either of the baseball games I attended this week. It was a very fun day, and as we said we were glad we had Freda here as a "tourist" to entertain. We'd never have taken the trip today on our own.