“The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Proust

My eighty-six-year-old mother spent the winter with us in Dublin, California. We took her to Point Reyes Lighthouse and the Wax Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf. We also took her to Muir Woods where a clerk at the gift shop convinced Mom that a packaged redwood seed would grow and adapt well to Michigan’s climate.
As time for Mom’s return to Michigan drew close, I asked her what we had missed or what she still wanted to do.

“I want to walk in the ocean,” she said.

Never mind that it was late February and the chill of a Northern California winter meant beaches weren’t currently on the top ten spots to visit.

We packed up Mom and headed to Half Moon Bay where everything we’d done before was new again. We ate croissants at an outdoor café where Mom welcomed a blackbird to her crumbs.

Mom coaxed winged creatures to join her.

Mom sighted an interesting church a block away and off she went to check it out. I hustled to keep up.

The stories it could tell.

The highlight of the day was granting Mom’s wish to wade in the water. On the way back to the car she brushed sand from her feet and stopped to admire calla lilies growing wild along the shoreline. They weren’t something she saw in Michigan. Her joy at the discovery reminded me of how much I’d loved the elegant white blooms when I first moved to the West Coast. They were a beauty I now took for granted.

A wish granted

Appreciation of their beauty renewed.

As we drove towards Pigeon Pointe Lighthouse, Mom ordered us to stop the car, then bounded out and into a nearby field to check what she thought was a thriving potato crop.

“Not potatoes,” she said when she returned. “I’ve never seen these before.”

Checking out the mystery crop.

Pigeon Pointe Lighthouse.

A hundred yards closer to the lighthouse she again said, “Stop.” She had spotted a woman walking beside the road. “Maybe she’ll know what they are.”

“Mom, she won’t know what they are . . . ”

But Mom was gone. She came back a minute later, a look of satisfaction plastered across her face. “Leeks. That’s what they are. Leeks.”

Our next stop was Sam’s Chowder House. With a reputation throughout the Bay Area, we’d decided it was the place to treat Mom to lunch. We managed a window table. A magnificent stretch of shoreline provided perfect ambiance.

You can’t beat the view.

Mom studied the menu and announced, “I’m too full to eat. That croissant was too much.”

For me, the croissant had just been an appetizer. I had saved plenty of room for the lobster roll that was declared by NBC’s Today Show one of America’s Top Five Sandwiches.

The server arrived at our table and Mom asked, “How big is the cup of clam chowder?”

The waitress pointed to a container sitting on the table next to us. In any other restaurant, it would have been called a bowl.

“And the bowl? How big is that?” Mom asked.

The waitress again gestured, this time to a serving bowl sized vessel.

“I think I’d better have the bowl,” Mom said.

I laughed out loud, and couldn’t suppress another chuckle when she swallowed the last bite.

And she ate it all up.

The lobster roll was worthy of the hype.

Julie Albrecht Royce, Travel Adventures Editor, is the author of Traveling Michigan's Sunset Coast and Traveling Michigan's Thumb, both published by Thunder Bay Press. She writes a monthly column for Wandering Educators.

On her blog, Julie is currently writing two weekly series.

On Mondays, she posts in her series entitled, "Ugly Shoes and Boomer Do Europe."
This series captures the humor and adventure of her rail trip from
Amsterdam to Budapest and then return river cruise back to Amsterdam.

On Thursdays, Julie writes about PILZ, the legal thriller novel she has written.

Log on to www.jkroyce.com/blog to follow along.

All photos courtesy and copyright Julie and Bob Royce