Pinnacles National Park in spring, part 1

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Just before April 2011, Sundari and Bev and I held a meeting of our unofficial (yet secretly powerful) travelers' society. We reminisced about traveling to Death Valley in 2010, and then we decided that we would not go quite so far for our next annual RV trip. Sundari and I both had heavy work schedules that month. Neither of us could get more than a few days off. Another requirement surfaced at our meeting: we greatly desired to experience real springtime, the kind that involves tender green shoots and a wide variety of flowers. Two years in a row of vacation in the desert was enough for us. Give us trees! we shouted. And interesting rocks, we added, as an afterthought.

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mini-vacation at costanoa, part 2 - crawling the coast

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On my second full day of vacation, I moved along this magnificent coastline at the pace of something that crawls, and slowly. Why would I speedwalk when I had all day to take pictures here, and nobody with me to sigh and look bored while I spent half an hour photographing a tangled clump of kelp? I savored every bit of this beach. The weather was sublime, with warm sea-scented air that lifted my hair and whispered against my skin. A bright blue sky complemented the brown and gold tones of the rocks. And oh, the sand! How soft it was where the wind had piled it up into dunes. How intricate its shapes and patterns where the water and rocks had sculpted it.

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mini-vacation at costanoa, part 1 - hiking the hills

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The footbridge over Whitehouse Creek.

In November of 2010, I desperately needed a vacation. It had been a busy year, full of wedding photography and other types of hard work, and all I wanted was to be alone for a few days far from all computer screens. I booked three nights at Costanoa, about half an hour's drive from my house in Santa Cruz. My biz partner dropped me off with my stuff and sped away, leaving me to enjoy the first solitary vacation I'd ever been on in my life. There were a few other resort visitors around, but not anybody I knew. For several days I rested and hiked and took pictures. It was exactly what I needed. Still need, in fact. I want to do it again, right now.

Costanoa is a marvelous place for a getaway, though it's a bit pricey. Many have said this, online and in print, and they are one hundred percent right. I discovered the place when hired to shoot a wedding there. It's a minimally developed resort right next to Año Nuevo State Park, my favorite stretch of coastline. You can stay in a room in the lodge, in a heated cabin, in an unheated tent cabin, or you can camp at the KOA campground there. I wanted to camp in my Tent Cot, but that November was particularly cold and kept hinting at rain. This was supposed to be a vacation full of ease and idle pleasure. I took the glamping option, and went for a tent cabin with a heated mattress pad. Every night when I'd finished dinner (also pricey, at the Cascade Restaurant on premises) I sat for a while in the Adirondack chair in front of my tent cabin and watched the fog roll in. Then I crawled into my warm bed and read mysteries or just thought about life, for hours and hours.

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a trip to death valley, part 6 - ubehebe crater, nevada blm, and red rock canyon on the way home

This post is part of a series. To read the first post, click here. To see more Death Valley photos, click here.

What do you do when you've just toured the remote Depression-era desert palace of several offbeat characters, and you only have about an hour left before you need to start driving toward Nevada? You visit a volcano, of course.

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a trip to death valley, part 5 - scotty's castle

This post is part of a series. To read the first post, click here. To see more Death Valley photos, click here.

Finally the time came to pack our lounge chairs, fold up the Tent Cot, and move on from Texas Spring campground. We only had one day left to explore Death Valley, and it was difficult to choose where to spend our precious and fleeting time. After much debate and deliberation, we headed north to Scotty's Castle in the spring-fed oasis of Grapevine Canyon. What a surprise it was, after driving through miles of the now-familiar barren landscape, to turn a corner and see cottonwood trees! When we disembarked from the RV, we could hear the faint rustling of palm trees too, a welcome sound after days of parched, dusty living.

Scotty's Castle is not a real castle, and it did not actually belong to Scotty. It's a sprawling mansion, built in in the 1920s in Spanish Colonial Revival style for Chicago millionaire Albert Johnson. The compound (also known as Death Valley Ranch) is now part of the national park. Tours are available almost daily, and are the only way to see the inside of this remarkable piece of architecture, which was never fully completed.

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