A Very Rainy Day

We drove an hour down the road to the little town of Larkspur today to have lunch with old friends Tom and Sandy who moved two years ago from a big dark house on a steep hill to a condominium near the San Francisco ferry terminal. They came to our house a few months ago for a tour of our new digs and today it was our turn to see theirs. We always like to include a hike or at least a walk of some kind, but it was pouring with rain. which is perhaps where the phrase 'put a damper' comes from...in this case the damper was definitely on anything more than running from the car to their front door.

OilMan and Tom, another oilman, used to travel the world together on oil business,  playing cards for hours in a hotel room in Dubai while visa issues were resolved, taking a taxi from Cairo to the Suez Canal, or licensing hydrocrackers in Kuwait. We had a pleasant afternoon talking about adventures old and new and watching the rain beat against their high, airy windows. All of us have done our share of traveling and we thoroughly enjoyed comparing stories.

Driving home, trucks obliterating our visibility with spray as they roared past, we decided to take the back road through the vineyards. It was beginning to get dark so I snapped a few pictures, none of them good, with my phone as we roared past the nearly naked vines. It was a very rainy day....