Butterfly Road Trip

This year we "hatched" some butterflies, and Katrina's favorite DVD is Little Einstein's Big, Huge Adventure, in which they meet a caterpillar that eventually changes into a butterfly and migrates to his "butterfly family reunion". Our friends, the Kaufman's "hatched"some butterflies too. So, when we heard that we could see the butterflies at the Butterfly Grove in Pismo Beach, we planned a road trip to go see them!

We left early this morning, driving through the farmlands of the Valley and then up into the foothills of the Coast Range. It was a cool, autumn day, but clear and sunny! Gorgeous! We did a lot of geocaching along the way. We found some caches that we had not found before and also stopped at several caches that we knew that the Kaufman's would like.

As we got into Pismo Beach, we went to the Butterfly Grove. That was so neat! The count for the day was 7500 butterflies! Wow! The butterflies were absolutely dripping from the trees. There were some flitting here and there, but most were just hanging out. We got there just in time to listen to the docent talk about the butterflies and their life cycle and their migration to and from the Grove. One thing that we learned that we did not know was that the butterflies that lay their eggs there and that move on do not ever come back to the Grove. It takes four or five generations for the butterflies to come back, which means that the children of the butterflies that leave there will never see this Grove. Yet, their descendants all know to go back there. That is amazing! We will definitely be coming back here again!

After the butterflies, we drove down to Santa Maria to visit with my Gpa Marshall. He recently moved to a retirement home there, Santa Maria Terrace. The girls played with Gpa's walker and we got to visit with him for a little while before he had to go down for dinner.

Afterwards we went to dinner at a restaurant in downtown Pismo and then walked out onto the pier and then we got back on the road to head home. As we left, it began to rain, so our timing was perfect!