Olema Campground

On September 2 I wrote that I was pretty bummed out about the rain the night before. I had been traveling through West Marin camping with my boys for a few days. We had arrived at Wildcat Camp a bit late and got rained on most of the night.

While I normally like to sleep under the sky, when the rain had petered out a bit, I reluctantly decided to sleep in the tiny two man tent with my two seven year old boys as a precaution. I fell asleep as it really started raining then. The volume was way more than I had anticipated and much more than earlier in the night. The boys kept kicking me and one spot kept dripping on my face but I just moved and covered up and it was OK. Miraculously, I was neither cold or too wet – I guess the tent was actually waterproof.

I woke up at 5:30 but the three of us just lay there until around seven. Then we got up and looked around. We ate some pretzels and I started taking the camp apart. Getting the sleeping bags done was the most important but the boys started stuffing them immediately. Then we started moving stuff around until things made sense.

Because I noticed the sky clearing up and that the tent was drying out, I set the tarps up in a different spot and got the bike nearly done. Then we changed for sunny weather and walked to the ocean.

I had some beverages ready (chocolate milk and a can of coffee for myself) and we walked to the cliffs above WIldcat. We looked out over the ocean for a while. After that we went to the outlet of Wildcat Creek. I noted that the lagoon had a lot of algae in it. I met a person who had had a hard time camping at Glen Campground in the rain.

I took the boys up back to the trail and we ascended to Wildcat Lake where we had a snack and I drank my second coffee. A bunch of people passed on their way from Palomarin and I realized the trail head is really close.

When we were done, we descended to the bike and got ready to go. Because we were on a bike, we kept pace with a couple of people as they were hiking with us. As we approached Glen Trail, the grade increased so much that I had to make the boys walk.

We passed a few other people on Glenn Trail also. I noted that there was some green stone. But I don’t think that that was a correct assessment. I noted that the rocks that we had been seeing up to this point were mostly sandstone and or slate. I noted that Glenn trail was really pretty and that the creeks on the Glenn side ran north.

Much later we found our way around to the Bear Valley Trail. We rode past some hikers to Divide Meadow and had a snack. I noted that we had debated over the decorative rocks arranged around the facilities there. I thought they look like granite but they could’ve been greenstone.

We rode into the Visitor Center then. The boys had fun looking at the exhibits and I sat for a rest. I saw a few people we had been camping with. I met a couple biking to Glenn Camp.

When we rode to the privately owned Olema campground, I thought I’d just do laundry but they had a site available so we set up our tent and I got a coffee. When I did this one of my boys said “this guy with his coffee.”

At about 5 o’clock, we headed to Point Reyes Station where I found a pizzeria. We put our name in and went to the grocery for food for the next couple of days. Then we sat down to eat. The food was good. After that I treated the boys to ice cream bars and then we headed back to Olema campground.

The boys went to sleep pretty quickly. I went to the laundromat to charge the bike and write.

This is an occasional series chronicling my life. This Notebook Analysis series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.