“Forgive me, gentle readers… it’s been seven days since my last post…”

It’s true. We drove to Stinson Beach last Thursday with four dear friends for a long weekend and some much needed “R&R”, and it’s taken me most of this week to catch up with myself and get back in the swing of things. Obviously, the decompression worked!

For those of you unfamiliar with Stinson Beach, it’s a little beach community in Marin County, California, with about 750 residents. A popular day trip for people from the San Francisco Bay Area and for tourists visiting northern California, it’s near such attractions as Muir Woods National Monument, Muir Beach, and Mount Tamalpais. It has a long beach with occasional opportunities for surfing, although the water is cold and fog is common throughout the year.

In 2002, a surfer was attacked by a 12-15 foot great white shark while surfing off Stinson Beach. The young man survived, but received more than 100 stitches to close his wounds. The attack was the second in Stinson Beach since 1998 and the 13th in Marin County since 1952. The surf off Stinson Beach is within an area known as the Red Triangle, where there have been an unusually high number of shark attacks. Needless to say, we stayed out of the water!

Our friends had the use of a beautiful beach house and invited us to share the weekend with them. What a rare treat! I won’t go into detail about what its owners refer to as their “beach house” — a luxury home by most people’s standards — but we enjoyed a panoramic view of the ocean and fell off to sleep every night listening to the surf just 16 steps from our back door!

Needless to say, Dawn and I took a lot of photos of the beach and the little towns of Stinson Beach and nearby Bolinas. We even visited the Point Reyes Lighthouse. It was a wonderful, relaxing weekend with good friends, no cell phones and no itinerary. I’ll try to get more images posted once I’ve had time to process and assemble them into an album. Meanwhile. I hope you enjoy these. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge.