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| Sea lions at La Jolla Cove. |
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| Lunch at Loma Linda Seafood, always a great place for fresh fish and the best tuna sandwiches. |
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| After lunch: visiting the Point Loma Lighthouse. |
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| Looking out to sea from a spot near the lighthouse: Evelyn, Tom, Miriam, and Alice. |
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| Left Detroit after a delay due to fog in San Diego having overwhelmed the airport. |
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| San Diego Airport overwhelmed with delays. People everywhere. Lucky us: only 1 hour late! |
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| Dinner near our hotel: a mango margarita. |
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| Fun Mexican restaurant in Del Mar which is part of San Diego. |
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| View from our hotel room in the morning, also in Del Mar. Looking out to sea. |
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| The hotel for our last two days |
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| Outside the door of our room |
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| The Piping Guan, rare bird that lives a few minutes drive from the lodge |
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| V.S.Naipaul's novel Miguel Street is about Trinidad. So it was perfect reading while I was there! |
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| I've been meaning to read Coelho's novel for years. I bought a copy in the airport and read it on the plane from Miami to Detroit. A nice traveler's tale for travel reading. |
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| Cahokia Jazz: What would the area around St. Louis (where I grew up) be like if all post-European-arrival history had been different? Here's a speculative -- and suispenseful-- fiction about the answere. |
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| Trinidad Piping Guan |
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| While eating breakfast we saw several chachalacas. These unusual birds have decided that the hotel outdoor dining room has lots of good food to scavenge. Note the evergreen boughs under these birds’ feet — they are part of the hotel’s Christmas decor. |
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| A Trinidad Motmot in the Main Ridge Forest Reserve, which has been legally protected since 1776. This act of protection is considered a landmark as the first ever conservation law. (Full info here) |
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Just as we were entering the Forest Reserve, we spotted two very colorful Trinidad Motmots — a species found only on Tobago and Trinidad. The prominent spot on the head was especially noticeable here, as the birds were sitting out on the ground rather than perching.  |
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| A hummingbird’s tiny claws really felt funny when it perched on my hand to sip sugar water from this feeder. I spent around an hour hand-feeding the willing little birds, and totally enjoyed it. |
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| Another person feeding a hummer. |
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| This morning we flew from Trinidad to Tobago. We boarded the plane in this picture, but it had an equipment failure, and we were reboarded onto another plane. So lucky that they had a backup plane! |
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| In the garden near the feeders, we also saw other birds, such as this woodpecker. |
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| We have checked into a seaside hotel with a swimming pool by the sea. |
