We headed out of town much later than we'd planned, but sometimes life works that way. We hit the local Subway for "dinner on the way" and the Starbucks down the road for Brad and me. ...and heading down the highway and out into the rural, I put a Lloyd Webber compilation in the CD player and shifted though the cuts as we ate and talked and watched the traffic sort itself out around us.

Wispy clouds filled the southeastern skies

...and streaks of heavier stuff obscured the sun to the west as the fields flowed past.

Corn was browned out and ready for silage harvest; the grape clusters were easily visible from the roadway. By the next county down, the fields were bare: stripped and tilled under and ready for the next planting. "Flagman ahead" slowed us to a stop for a time, but allowed for a few better cloud pictures than the ones I'd been trying for. ...and once again the traffic tried to sort itself out, but to what end? Kettleman slows all traffic to a crawl as you approach I-5.

The music had changed to Chris LeDoux's live album from 1997; it was much more appropriate for the vast spaces of the Central Valley

and the brown hills lining its western side. The sun was riding low and throwing shadows from one hill onto the next in a cascading effect.

...and as I turned off the well-traveled road to the slower one, I kicked the music to yet another style and Mark O'Connor's 'fiddle' provided the background music for the trip through the scrub oak to watch the deer feeding. ..and to watch those wisps in the eastern sky fade through red to pink while the cotton ropes to the west lit up in a golden glow.

Darkness was falling as we slid through the back route into Atascadero; and the music played on as we looked for owls in the the open spaces above the trees that overhung the road into the last hills before the coast. The strains of the "Orange Blossom Special", with the haunting sounds of the wheels and the whistle, spilled over us as Morro Bay marked the turn toward home.

...and the melancholy words of "Now it Belongs to You", the story of a fiddle passed down from father to son, filled the night air as we pulled into this sleepy seaside town.

...and now a year or two later, even if the pictures from the camera are a little blurry from road motion, I can still say, "Yeah, like that..."