Napa Slough

Because she's a friend and we like her, we continue to go  to see Cheslyn Gan, our eye doctor, so Dana took Blake to school with her today and we drove to Walnut Creek for our annual visits to see Cheslyn.

It's a bit of a roller coaster ride starting with the Kenwood and Carneros wine regions and along the Napa Slough, a wetland at the Northern edge of the San Pablo Bay, an arm of the SanFrancisco Bay. 50 square kilometers or so are abandoned salt evaporation ponds. Most of it is only accessible by boat, and, I would venture to say, a very small boat at that since there are places where the depth is less than a foot.

At the bottom of the slough we cross a bridge which rears up out of nowhere and subsides back to sea level almost as quickly when it has crossed the Napa River which separates the Mare Island Naval Shipyards from the city of Vallejo.

 Mare Island, now closed is on  the National Register of Historic Places as it was the first US Navy base established on the Pacific ocean and was a submarine port as well as a major force in US shipbuilding efforts during World War II. The enormous dry-docks are still there and until fairly recently, a huge fleet of mothballed naval vessels of all kinds was a landmark of sorts in the Suisun Bay near Benicia.

To end the trip, we are decanted onto a six lane freeway as we drive past the Six Flags amusement park with its mass of roller coasters loop-the-loops and other rides which I would never go near. I have included a picture as an extra photo.

Although it is an interesting area, it isn't particularly picturesque, but being partial to layers, I liked the picture of the Napa Slough from the car. 

It doesn't seem to bother OilMan, but after an hour of having bright lights and dilating drops in my eyes, all I wanted to do was close them for the drive home again.