More Fort Ord, an Airport and Sea Lions

We drove out to the rest of Fort Ord this morning.  We went in the Creekside Terrace entrance.  It's enormous.  It its hey day, the base covered 28,000 acres and was home to 50,000 soldiers.  In 1994 the base closed, and it was declared a national monument in 2012.  Thank you President Obama!  There are miles of trails, dirt roads and paved roads for your biking, hiking and horse riding pleasure.  It will not be covered up with more housing.  Instead, it's being left alone.  Half of it is not open to the public, due to ordinance from the artillery ranges needing to be cleaned up.

There is a lot of this.  See the brown line, that's a dirt road.

This was a really cool trail down to the bottom of the canyon.  Down hillers have been there.  We could see banked turns with tire tracks all the way up the sides.

I know I do go on about the scope of the agriculture here, but it's still quite amazing to me.  The section in the middle that looks wet is strawberry production.  That's the plastic I mentioned yesterday.

Look how good that dirt looks on the right.  If you squint you can see the orange about mid photo.  That's a pumpkin stand.

See the white about mid photo?

That is these things.  Jim and I, having no agricultural knowledge what so ever, don't know what's growing under cover.  This is, however, a lot of it.

After leaving Fort Ord, we drove through the Marina Municipal Airport.  This used to be an army air base.  That's a hangar as seen from the side.

Big runways.

I don't think the control tower is staffed.

The Marina Fire Department was there doing some sort of training exercise.  It appears that three out of the four did not mind having their picture taken.

At the airport there was also a large go cart track set up and there was sky diving.

When we got home, we walked over to get another picture of the sea lions with a better camera. There was another group on a different float just howling they were so loud.  Unfortunately, due to the fences we could not get a look at them.