Quarantine Lessons From Spaceflight

Thoughts on the similarities.

Meanwhile, we’re back home. As noted, we did drive up to Cambria (with the cats, which was…interesting — it was their first road trip, and Ember cried most of the way). It was relaxing up there, but a little weird, with all the restaurants being closed except for delivery or carry out, and most of the motels empty (we had a vacation rental across the street from the beach). We drove up to Ragged Point on Saturday (which was also closed except for gas and the general store), but no further into Big Sur, then perused the elephant seals on the way back to town. Not that many on the beach; it was just past mating season. A few week ago the beach at Piedras Blancas would have been full of them, fighting and fu**ing (I could have just written “mating,” but I liked the alliteration), and the mothers and pups trying to avoid being crushed by the bulls.

Did a three-mile hike Sunday on the bluffs above the ocean, and shot lots of pictures of breaching and fluking gray whales and their spouts as they migrated north. Very weird being up there on a weekend with so little traffic. I may post some, after we look at them to see how they came out.

Got back to Redondo Beach yesterday (the lack of heavy traffic on the 405 through Sepulveda Pass and West LA on a Monday afternoon was a little eerie), and now get to put the house back together after fumigation. The cats (who cried all the way back) are looking around and at each other like they’re wondering “Was that all some sort of weird dream?” Not infected, as far as we know (seems unlikely, considering that we were already hermits before this all started; it’s an introvert’s paradise).

[Update mid-morning]

One thing we saw up there that we never see in LA: Stars. We were across the street from the beach, and it was quite a dark neighborhood. Orion was very obvious, and I could easily see the Pleides naked eye. Milky Way wasn’t obvious, though.

6 thoughts on “Quarantine Lessons From Spaceflight”

  1. Were you playing music during the trip? I once had a cat complain for hours during a road trip until I remembered that he didn’t like rock & roll. He enjoyed classical music and occasionally jazz.

    1. Listened to news, but some music, including classical. Didn’t seem to help. They didn’t like the motion of the car, with the bumps and changing accelerations. They’d stop complaining when we stopped.

  2. Do kitties suffer from motion sickness? I’m pretty sure they orient according to the gravity vector most of the time, not what they see.

  3. Where I live, the northern sky is clear and dark, so I get to see the Pleiades clearly. I-85 and some big towns are to the south, so the southern sky is hazed out unless there a widespread power failure. The Milky Way is usually just a trail of smudges, much less than what I remember as a child. Of course, I lived in southeast Utah back then, so the night sky was vivid.

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