Mondays are for dreaming: The gray whale migration

There are lots of things I love about writing a travel blog. I love how it brings a sense of possibility into the most dreary of days. When I’m feeling homebound or tied down all I have to do is poke around my own site for a few moments to remember all the places I’ve been and those still to come. And I love the people I’ve “met” online – the community of wanderers who have wonderful adventures and take beautiful photographs and inspire me to add still more locations to my bucket list.

But perhaps what I love most of all is how the site has meant an end to inertia, how it has led me to look at my life as one big opportunity for exploration. Not that I didn’t travel before, but I was less spontaneous and creative about it. I’m so much more likely now to pick up and go, to fit trips in, to add a flight so that I can cover more ground because really, what else better have I got to do? Case in point: in a few weeks we will once again be making our annual spring-break trip to Phoenix to visit Matt’s parents. Matt also needs to go to Los Angeles on a business trip. Originally he was going to fly to L.A. solo the week prior to spring break and then drive to Arizona to meet me and the boys but as we discussed our plans one evening a few weeks ago he said, “why don’t you see if you can get a one-way ticket to Los Angeles for you and the boys? You could fly out a few days after I leave and meet me there instead.”

So I did. Simple as pie and no more expensive than flying to and from Phoenix. And now we’ll get to visit with the boy’s great grandparents who live in California, see the lovely little house in Pasadena where we spent a very happy three months (it’s where Tommy turned two), and introduce Teddy to the LaBrea Tar Pits, the Pie n’ Burger, and the Pacific Ocean.

I’m also hoping that we will get to see some of the gray whales that every winter and spring make the long journey down the coast from Alaska to Mexico and back again. We’ll be there at the point when the mothers who have had calves should be swimming from Baja to the Bering Sea. Teddy’s passion for marine animals has only increased since our trip to Atlantis, and today I’m dreaming of taking a boat ride under that impossibly blue California sky, looking as hard as we can for blows and then hoping to see the magnificent tails curving out of the water. I think we’ll probably do this as part of a visit to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, which is a lovely place with an especially wonderful outdoor interactive exhibit where visitors can touch and feed some of the animals. We’ll also be stopping by the Point Vincente Interpretive Center in Rancho Palos Verdes, which has an exhibit and information about the whales and is on a peninsula that affords great views of them as they pass by.

What are you dreaming of this Monday? Please feel free to share a link below, making sure you link directly to your post, not your site’s homepage and that you link back to this post. Questions? See About Monday Dreaming.

Photo courtesy of eco-photography via Flickr.