Salinas art

We've finished our big round of family visits and doctor visits. Also, we're gradually gaining (we think) on our effort to absorb the quantities of family history we greedily photocopied during our many library visits last Fall. As we enter details of generations of ancestors into our database, we realize that we Buried cars behind the field will have a long list of villages, towns, cemeteries and more libraries to visit during the next months. We'll be travelling east and then north, keeping a sharp eye on the weather!

No matter how well we think we know a place, there are always surprises. We're enclosing some photos taken in California as examples.

In Salinas and the surrounding areas, large cutout figures illustrate the local life. In Salinas itself, we were amused by the auto body picture. [Does any reader know the history of these cutouts? Are they art, advertising or otherwise?] What is this plant?

In the hills far south of Salinas (Priest Valley, to be exact), there's a different kind of auto graveyard, a literal one (or possibly another personal artistic vision.) Can you spot the cars? There must have been dozens, spaced along the bank of the creek for nearly a mile Field of asparagus

The flowers are beginning to sprout in the flower fields near Lompoc, and the strawberries are already being harvested -- chances are that you are eating California strawberries now, no matter where you live! We send two photos -- one of a mysterious black plant that looks like broccoli (anybody know what it is?) and another of an asparagus field of many acres, at least a quarter section.

We're looking forward to more surprises as we hit the road again.