First task on day 60 (after coffee) was to fix the flat I got on the way home from errands yesterday afternoon. I walked about 2 miles with the flat because I had forgotten to bring my pump. Turned out to be a brad nail that put two holes in the tube.
It wasn’t a big delay and in the first 36 miles I had only gone up 575′ & down 340.’ The one climb of the day was 900′ so not bad for 50 some miles in CA. The weather was standard for CA so far: cool and foggy in the morning and sunny and warm in the afternoon. Coming over Mt. Madonna into south Santa Cruz county, the fields in the valley were covered in white structures. Solar panels maybe? No, as I got closer, I saw that it was plastic covering the fields. Sometimes roofs over blue berries and raspberries, sometimes plastic over strawberry rows, and sometimes a field was just covered completely in long rows of whiteish plastic.
My arrival in Watsonville had three treats in store. First, was a motel and another night in a bed. Second, I was getting my omicron booster at Walgreens, and lastly, my good friend from high school, John Richers, was driving down from Fresno to take me to dinner.
The experience at Walgreens could only be described less as a treat and more as chaos. I got to the pharmacy at ten till 4 for my 4 o’clock appt and joined the line 6 people deep. Though I had made the appt online and filled out all of the questions, they only had the appt info so I had to fill it out again. I knew I was in for a long wait when a woman appeared from behind the immunization screen just before I got to the window and asked when she was going to get her 3:30 appt shots. I finally got my jab at 4:40. John had texted me five minutes before that he was in the motel lobby waiting. I texted my situation back and he drove the 2 miles to Walgreens and picked me up.
We had a very nice dinner (oak grilled oysters and calamari for appetizers and grilled avacado seafood platter) at The Fish House and a great time catching up on the 49 years between high school and now in more detail than we ever had time for before. The short synopsis for John was a degree from PSU in environmental science, a 3 year stint in the Peace Corps in the Philippines where he met his wife, two daughters, and a 40 year career as an executive with the Boy Scouts.
Back at the motel, the only side effects of the vaccine was a bit of alimentary distress (but that could’ve been the mussels) and a little soreness in my arm. The mildest reaction I’ve had so far.
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