Mom was celebrating her birthday and requested a day trip over to Moss Landing, just north of Monterey. Walking on the beach, eating fried oysters at Phil’s Fish Market & Eatery and stopping by the vegetable stand on the way home were on her birthday list.
Mom’s birthday was a big one and I won’t say just how big, but it was a big one. When I asked her what she would like to do to celebrate, she gave my sister and I several ideas. My sister created a wonderful birthday celebration complete with banana splits and I took care of the Moss Landing adventure. It made for a long day, driving the 3 hour or so drive over there, but we accomplished all of the items on Mom’s list.
First up was that walk on the beach. To maximize our time, we parked on the street near Phil’s and walked on the sand path that runs along the west side of Phil’s to get to the beach and off Mom went. You just never know what you will see while walking this stretch of beach. Sometimes I get lucky and spot whales and dolphins.
We spotted a man trying his luck for clams and watched him for a while but he didn’t have any luck.
We walked on.
We watched a bird that I think is some sort of Sandpiper. Once I got home, I located a great website for identifying birds in the Moss Landing area called the Moss Landing Wildlife Area Check List, but I still couldn’t be sure if this was a Least Sandpiper.
We watched the waves crash.
Then we spotted it. What was on those old poles? We slowly walked closer to get a good look and if we were lucky, maybe a picture.
We had a posing seagull.
We continued walking along the beach until we decided that we were getting hungry, so we turned around and headed back the same we came out. Those old poles were empty.
And we had a different guy clamming, maybe with a little better luck than the other guy.
Phil’s is always busy around lunchtime but the line moved quickly and Mom got her fried oyster fix.
And a nice man took our picture in front of Phil’s.
I don’t know why I stopped taking pictures at this point but I did. I started to swing my car into the parking lot of the vegetable stand next to the The Whole Enchilada and it was closed up. No vehicles in the parking lot, all of the doors and windows were shut and we knew this was not good, not good at all. That vegetable stand called Farm Fresh Produce was a big one and you never knew what kind of great deal they would have that day. This was very sad.
I knew of a couple of other produce stands on the say home, not as good, but we could stop by and see what they had. I had noticed more cars at the one closest to Moss Landing on the way in and stopped. It turned out this was the Farm Fresh Produce store that used to be in Moss Landing, the one that we always stopped by, and they had moved. OK, we were back in business. Artichokes and tomatoes were the big deals to be had. I located a bargain bin with sad looking bags of produce in it and started checking them out closer. I scored with a bag of big artichokes that I figured once I got home, I could cut the bad spots off of them and they would work fine. There were 11 extra large artichokes crammed into that bag for one dollar! And I picked up a big bag of tomatoes. I checked it out closely and could see there were a few tomatoes that I needed to pick out first and either eat or throw out once I got home. 12 good sized tomatoes were in that bag and I was eating tomato sandwiches every day for a while. Mmmm! Oh, and Mom picked up a bag of artichokes also. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, I shared some of my tomatoes with mom.
We had a fun adventure and achieved all of our goals!
Maps:
Moss Landing Area Courtesy Google Maps
Prior Blogs in this Area:
Escape to Moss Landing January 24, 2016
Sources:
Moss Landing Wildlife Area Check List
Prior Blogs in the Area:
