Cabrillo National Monument and Park

Today we loaded copious amounts of gear onto our new home for the next 3 weeks...The New Horizon. Yesterday Jeff and I didn't get to do any loading because the ship got in late so today everyone was feverishly loading gear and trying to stake out lab space to work on. Yesterday we visited Cabrillo National Monument and took a brief seaside walk along the rugged shoreline, taking time to check out all the wildlife.

From the Park's Visitor center you can see downtown SD well.

Apparently Cabrillo was the first European to set foot on the west coast, but he was a conquistador. (aka not a nice guy)
The Nature of the park certainly had more of a draw than the History and Jeff and I spent a majority of our time exploring this small sliver of coastline.
The weathering patterns created some crazy formations in the soil where cliffs did not exist.
The trails going down to the tidal pools.

The formations provided good contrast against the blue sky backdrop.
Surf pounding the rocks made a good resonating and chest thumping thunder.
Giant Kelp Leaves were washing up on shore along with their gas pods intact.

Gulls, Pelicans and cormorants hanging out on a "decorated" rock.
Some kind of flower with super neat fruiting bodies and somewhat plain flowers.
We saw these bugs that looked like roaches from far away and they were super sensitive to light changes and shadows like roaches, so I hopped down in this large blow hole to get a closer look.
We aren't sure what they were so we just dubbed them "beach roaches" for now. They kind of look like modern trilobites and they are super fast.
And...the coolest bug of the day Jeff found along the trail on some mysterious fruit.