Last night before bed, Nole was reviewing our Ring camera footage and he noticed a lot of people were coming and going from our house, including some men. When I looked it seemed like our sitter had brought her dad with her–she is a teen and she was coming at night so that made sense. But when I went back a few days I noticed our neighbor was also coming over. It was a case of “oops, two petsitters!”. Well two are better than none, right? We cleared up the confusion with a few texts.

We woke up pretty cold this morning. We knew we were getting a little low on propane but we thought we would be okay for a few days. The burners on the stove started when we got up in the morning so I actually think the thermostat was just glitching a bit. In the end without being able to run the generator until 10 am in our campground and the cold, we decided to pack up and get propane, donuts and coffee. We tried a friendly Ace Hardware first but no luck on filling a propane tank. We did get our coffee and donut fix though and made our way to the next big town where we were going to try a U-Haul for a propane fill. We made a stop a guaranteed monarch roost near Prismo Beach first.

There were clusters of over-wintering monarchs on the branches but they were difficult to see well since they were up high.

They’re the things that look a bit like dead orange leaves. A nice man with a fancy camera let the kids take a look at the pictures he was taking.

Cal’s distance vision is pretty bad and he forgot his glasses for the trip. I bought him a tiny telescope in the monarch gift shop and now he can see all the far things!

Then it was back on the road for our date with U-Haul. There was a winding mountain pass that lead there and Esme was feeling a little worse for wear when we got there. I put her in the front seat, gave her sea-bands and a anti-nausea patch but it was too late.

That’s Nova laying on top of her because she “needed a nap”. We got to our next destination Carpinteria Beach and had lunch. I thought she would feel better once we got some fresh air so all of us except Cal went to the beach. It seemed to work and the kids played and had fun building a sandcastle with a wall to protect it from the waves.

Then they danced in the surf and begged the ocean to try and destroy their fort. We stayed about 30 minutes later than we wanted because the kids really wanted to see this happen but the tide was moving slow and the sun was getting low so eventually we convinced them to move on. Esme, who seemed cured after getting to the beach, complained about a stomach ache but that was solved with a quick pit stop in the bathroom. She’s been fine since! Yay!

Cal joined us and we took a hike through Tar Pits Park. Alas we found no tar, just puddles of water that made us question if we knew the difference between water and tar. It smelled like asphalt though.

Anyway, the hike continued to a harbor seal sanctuary. As in a beach that can’t be easily reached by humans. The seals hang there so they can get some God damn peace and quiet, alright? (Nole and I need a Mom and Dad sanctuary right about now, can you tell?). The seals were very cute. There were babies and the seals look really cute when they flop around. Some were playing in the surf. We all used Cal’s new telescope to get a good look. We even tried using it with our phone camera for an interesting result. Cal said the pictures we took with the telescope look like a fever dream, haha.

Oh and we saw this Jerusalem cricket which was super creepy!

And I got some video of the harbor seals flopping around.

Then it was time to head back to our RV, walking through the tar pit park again. No tar, no tar, no tar. “They need to rename this place…” Then we struck gold…er, tar! Nope spotted a tar pit and Asa stuck his finger in it first thing.

He kept the tar in a ziplock bag and it stinks to high heaven. He still has tar on his hands after many washings…

Anyway, we had a great day and spent more time than we thought we would doing all of those activities so as we drove down Highway 1, it went from sunset to dusk to dark. We got to our campground at Leo Carrillo, hooked up to electric (woohoo!) and made a quick dinner of ravioli. Tonight we will watch Encanto (new Disney movie) on Esme’s iPad and eat popcorn.