Farewell to Catalina Island

On our last day on the Island we finally made it up to the rooftop terrace of our guesthouse:

Pretty great view!  We were sorry we hadn't gone up earlier, when the sun was out.

Anyway we thought we would have the Island to ourselves once the weekend was over, but instead a cruise ship arrived with three shuttle boats continually bringing passengers to shore.  Clearly it was time to get out of Dodge.

Leo got  good shot of this osprey hanging around the pier

Heck, why don't we call him the Bird of the Day!

Our last task as we waited for our ferry was to try to get a picture of Clifornia's State marine fish, the Garibaldi damselfish

Which was swimming around the dock.  Fun fact:  the Garibaldi is named after Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi's red shirt though the fish is clearly bright orange.  Fun fact 2:  California has both a marine state fish and freshwater state fish (the golden trout, clearly golden) while Canada has only recently got its act together and nominated a national bird, and the wrong one!  (The whiskey jack, not the loon which is our real national bird . . . Its on a coin already for heavenssake, like the beaver!)

So long Catalina Island with cruise ship in background 

On the trip over the ferry was packed, every seat was taken, but on the return we pretty much had the outdoor seating to ourselves.

Connie scanning for shearwaters

From the ferry terminal in Long Beach, we walked a few blocks to the Enterprise office to pick up our rental car and drove 8 miles to Sunset Beach and our optimistically named motel, the Oceanview. It turned out to be more like the Pacific Highwayview, but in fact, fom our window, in a gap between the buildings across the highway, I could see some blue water.

It's an interesting area of cheap motels, dive bars, diners and liquor stores.  But if you cross th highway and go one block, there's the beach, empty in January, and stretching from Oregon to the tip of Baja California.

Let's end this there, with a sunset on Sunset Beach.

Catalina Tiles

From 1927 to 1937 the Wriggleys operated a pottery that made tiles and vessels from local Catalina clay.  It was used to decorate the stores on Main Street

and benches along the waterfront.

This modern mural decorates a wall with scenes from the island,

and this bank machine is also decorated with tile.

TIles are used on memorial monuments:

And this mosaic greets visitors coming off the ferry:

Recuperation Day - Avalon, Ca

Typical Avalon Street lined with golf carts

We had a relaxing start to the day as Leo recovered from his race.  Our room is on the second floor up a narrow, steep stairwell, and it was intensely amusing to me (though not at all to Leo) to watch him hobble up and down the stairs.

In the afternoon, I promised Leo I could show him a new bird he had never seen before, so we very slowly retraced my previous day's route to the botanic garden.

Halfway up is a subdivision called Bird Park, after an aviary built by the Wriggleys that once held exotic birds.

Across from the old aviary was a house that brought to mind another retirement town, Bisbee, Arizona:

The sculpture is made of animal skeletons (bison?)

And here we found the Bird of the Day:

The spotted dove, native to South Asia, escaped and formerly common in the Los Angeles area, but now declining, though still thriving on Catalina Island.

Avalon Ultramarathon

Our Guesthouse

Leo got up at 4 am for his 50 mile race start at 5 am while I slept in.  When I left our room at 10 am, the streets were deserted.  

I walked up the hill to the Holiday Inn for a view of the ocean and the town of Avalon below.

View from the Holiday Inn

By the time I walked back downhill again the town had woken up and everyone was driving around in golf carts.  Vehicles are severely restricted on the island.  There's a 12-year waiting list to bring a real vehicle onto the island.  And for good reason; there's really no place to park them.  And the carts are restricted to just the town of Avalon.  There's a locked gate to the road that leads to the airport and the other smaller town of Two Harbors.  So the only way to see the rest of the island is to take a tour or sign up for a 50 mile ultramarathon.  (Or a 4-day backpacking trip.  Hiking is free but camping in a developed campsite is $60!)

In the afternoon, I walked up to the Wrigley Memorial and botanic garden.  The garden concentrates on cacti and succulents from around the world and also endangered plants that exist only on the island.

Endangered endemic Catalina Island Mountain Mahogany

This endangered mahogany is the only one I could get a decent picture of.  The other plants were completely enclosed in chicken wire (see lower left of photo) to prevent browsing by feral animals that have wreaked havoc on local species.

Pigs and goats have been removed, but mule deer and bison brought in for a western movie remain.

View from Wrigley Monument

The Wrigley Monument was built to commemorate William Wriggley of chewing gum fame, who once owned the island and developed for tourism.  It's a typical folly.  I was sitting on the bench on the lower right of the picture when a Catalina Island fox (endemic) casually trotted down the curving staircase, sauntered over to pee on a metal post and slipped into the bushes.  They were almost wiped out by distemper, so they have been captive breeding them and releasing them in the wild.

Leo did well in his race finishing in under 10 hours.  He's often the oldest person running in his trail races, but this race has lots of oldsters.
There's an 82 year old who's run it for 35 consecutive years (he started a day before everyone else and took 26 hours), but he's retiring this year and will only run the 50 km next year.

Leo chased a fellow in his age group downhill the last 3 miles but couldn't catch him and finished 17 seconds out of third place, so he's he's a little bummed out, and suffering mightily today from the pounding he gave his legs.

We had fun at the banquet, an excellent meal and we sat at a table with a runner from Dallas, Texas, a teacher who moved from Minnesota to San Francisco to escape the winters, a young local born in Mexico who came second in his age class on his first long distance race, and a young Minnesotan woman who moved to Los Angeles to escape the winters.  But her boyfriend Dmitri, outright winner of the 50 k race, won the "one time I ran in weather so cold I . . ."  bragging rights. He's originally from Irkutsk, Siberia!

Bird of the day:

There's tons of these adorable acorn woodpeckers flying around the palm trees.

The Island of Romance

While we were waiting to catch the bus to the ferry terminal, we were puzzled by an odd group of inappropriately youthfully dressed middle-aged people walking by.  Then we remembered that the day before we went through the Long Island Convention Centre and saw a skateboarding convention in progress.  They were most likely a group of totally appropriately dressed middle-aged skateboarders!

When we got to the ferry terminal, we found another group of inappropriately youthfully dressed seniors.  These turned out to be ultramarathoners headed for the same race as Leo.

Leo waiting for the ferry to leave

The ferry ride took about an hour.  We were hoping to see some interesting pelagic birds, but there were not many birds, and the ferry was moving so fast they were hard to identify.  We did see two different species shearwaters, the sooty and probably a black-vented or manx. They are really beautiful to watch, as they fly rapidly just along the surface of the water, almost as as fast as our ferry.

We went out for a carbo-loading meal of pasta, before turning in early, as Leo's race started at 5 am the next day.

Catalina Island with the private Tuna Clubhouse in the foreground, and the landmark Catalina Casino in the background

Long Beach

Much to our surprise it was raining when we got up in the morning, but just as we decided over coffee that we better go to a museum, the sun came out.  So we walked along the seawall past the aquarium

Long Island is full of ceramic mosaics, this one by the aquarium

 and over to find the Catalina Island ferry berth, checking out the birds as we went:  buffleheads, surf scoters, water and eared grebes - fellow snowbirds from the Cariboo like us, perhaps?

In the palms and eucalyptus trees we also spotted a rufus hummingbird and yellow-rumped warblers.

In the afternoon we took the bus to Belmont Shores (a Long Beach suburb) to pick up some last minute ultramarathon supplies (gels and socks) at a running store, and then we walked the three miles back along the beach.

There we spotted the bird of the day

Red-shouldered hawk and right beside it, a kestrel feeding on a mouse.

We passed several of these "islands", actually oil rigs planted with palms to disguise them.

26 Miles Across the Sea

Santa Catalina is a-waiting for me.

Downtown Long Beach

We are on a short trip to Southern California where Leo will run a 50 mile race on Catalina Island on Saturday.

We flew out of Vancouver on Wednesday morning, arrived in Los Angeles at noon and caught the Metro to Long Beach.  Did you even know there was a metro in Los Angeles?  Well neither does a large portion of the population of L.A.  We were practically the only white people on the system.  Unlike in the rest of the world, in L.A. the middle class does not use the transit system.  But for $2.75 for me and 1.75 for Leo as a senior citizen, we traveled from the airport to our motel in Long Beach in the same time as it would have taken a shuttle van at a fraction of the price ($50 for the 2 of us).  That's your budget travel trip for the day.

We're staying in Long Beach because this is where the ferry to Catalina Island sails from.  It reminds me of either Penticton or Dallas Road, only much bigger and with way more homeless people (true of all American cities, in my experience), and with way more houseplants growing outside:

There's high rise apartments and hotels lining the shore, but the streets were very empty during the day, the residents presumably at work, and the hotel guests all at Disneyland?

Later in the evening we went to the supermarket and the streets were busy with people walking their dogs and buying their groceries.