Beaches, blasters and butterflies

Part of the charm of a road trip are the serendipitous moments. For no particular reason other than the fact that it is on our path southward, we stop in Pismo Beach for the night. With a population less than 8,000 people, this quiet beach town touts its surfing, white sand beaches, wine tasting and Monarch butterflies.

Not a lot going on in the evening in Pismo Beach. We watched part of Star Wars Episode 2 - Attack of the Clones. We only watched part because, honestly, it was kind of hard to get through it in one sitting.

Fast Movie Review: Okay, so in Episode 1, little Anakin Skywalker (played by Jake Lloyd) could not deliver a convincing line, but at least he was cute. In Episode 2, Anakin is grown up (played by Hayden Christensen) and he's such a dreadful actor that no amount of cuteness will help. Worse, his tortured, saccharine relationship with the apparently un-aging Padmé is something between disturbing and grating. Padmé has a new outfit in every scene, and they are awesome. And she is a warrior badass, which makes one wonder what she sees in the bumbling apprentice Jedi Anakin. She should dump him like an overheating light saber. Effects -- particularly the Kaminoans -- are still cool. Rating: 2 Deathstars.

Back to Pismo Beach: it is nice to wake up to a view like this.

And we enjoyed some down time with Anna's new laser tag blasters, with a ukelele soundtrack from Sophie.

On the way out of town (cue On The Road Again, Willie Nelson version), we stopped at the Pismo Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove. Like all of us, the Monarchs want to escape the cold in the north. So, they head south for the winter, finding safe haven in eucalyptus groves down the Central Coast between October and February.

The Monarchs hang from the tree limbs, like shingles, one's wings sheltering another. The weight of these clusters keeps the butterflies from whipping around in the wind.

Evolution is cool.