Thursday, September 21st - Naples, California and the Pacific Ocean.

After breakfast with Chris, we walked for a couple of hours around the city of Naples in the morning. The air was cool, the sun was bright, and the sky was a cerulean blue, all together beautiful weather to see the sights. Naples is a fairly small city by the bay crisscrossed by canals bordered by houses with private docks.

The attraction of Naples was the wide variety of houses with wildly contrasting architectural styles. It could have looked like a mess, but each house was so nicely done and painstakingly maintained that the effect was of a delicious smorgasbord of homes rather than architectural chaos. I particularly liked the gardens out in front of many of the homes because flowers such as roses were in bloom, which is always pleasant. I found many other exotic plants blooming that I couldn't even recognize but they surely were pretty.

Many of the homes also had sculptures in front of their home.

Sailboats and powerboats occupied the docks in front of most of the homes. Some of these were serious powerboats or cruising sailboats suitable for the open ocean, but many smaller boats were clearly just designed for gunk holing about on the canals and perhaps the sheltered waters of the adjacent bay. It certainly looked like fun.

We had lunch in the nearby "Boys Town" section of the city and then drove south on coastal Route 101 toward San Juan Capistrano. It's the place where swallows come back every year to bask in the southern California sun a bit before migrating back north. The drive provided many great views of ocean, beaches, and the sometimes quirkily idiosyncratic towns that line the southern California coast.

Stopping for a while at Sunset Beach, we went for a walk and did some beach combing. Monika found some unique shells and we even took off our shoes and socks to wade in the Pacific Ocean a bit. We finished our drive with a snack at the cafe across the street from Mission San Juan Capistrano.

We finally retraced our steps back to Chris's home for a relaxing evening of chatting plus occasional musical interludes.