Photo Friday: Thinking Cool Thoughts

The weather here has been getting gradually and consistently warmer, and I think we will crest into the low nineties sometime early next week. While this may sound pleasant to those of you in Georgia, please remember that we don't have the luxury of a/c in our apartment--two weeks of temperatures in the mid-eighties outside means that we're hovering in the low eighties inside our apartment as well! Many sunny afternoons, I find myself parked in front of the oscillating fan thinking cool, breezy thoughts, like this one...

Two years ago this week, we were cruising up the Pacific Coast Highway with the top down in this electric-blue wonder.

By the time we ended our trip in San Francisco, I had sunburn on top of sunburn, despite our efforts to keep up with sunscreen and to drive with the top up during the hottest part of the day, and spent the last night in the hotel room soaking washcloths in the ice bucket and draping them over my forearms. I was thinking cool thoughts then, too, and suddenly possessed extreme empathy with this creature:

By far one of the coolest stops along our drive, and one of my favorite photos from the trip, was McWay Falls in the Julia Pheiffer Burns State Park. The eighty-foot waterfall seems to appear out of nowhere; when the tide is out, the water pours onto the wet sand before it meets the waves, and when the tide is in, the waterfall empties directly into the ocean. Perhaps what I liked best about it was that the surrounding land renders the beach inaccessible to tourists, so the pristine sand and bright-blue lagoon remain undisturbed.