We woke up to a beautiful, sunny and warm day on Monday and I suddenly realized it was already March 1st. That meant we’ve been away from home for just over 2 months now.
Thinking back, I realized that on January 1st, we were just beginning our 3 day stay in Marina Bay, CA on the Monterey Peninsula. Our time at the Marina Dunes RV Park is still one of the highlights of our current trip, so I’m going to feature some pics of our time there in today’s blog because they’re some of my personal favourites.
Paulette, Molly & Rylie at Marina Dunes on Jan. 1, 2010
As for yesterday, I had nothing in particular planned for the day, I intended to spend most of my time relaxing up at the swimming pool or reading back at our site. How quickly plans can change because when I was taking the dogs to the park around 9am, I heard a woman call out “Hey, Rick”! It was Sharon, the Computer Discussion Group Coordinator, and she wanted to know if I could take over today’s 1pm class for her as she had another appointment. Well….NO, I didn’t really want to do that, but I said YES as I didn’t really have a good excuse handy!
Marina Dunes Beach is one of the nicest beaches we’ve seen anywhere
Make sure you know what you’re talking about, make sure it’s interesting to the participants and “keep it simple” – those thoughts ran through my head as I headed back to our RV after spending an hour at the dog park. That was always my philosophy when I was working and had to put on the odd computer related seminar or class so I saw no particular reason to change at this point.
Molly and Rylie loved running on this beach
What could I do? I know – pictures! I’ve yet to see an RV’er that doesn’t have a camera and all of us would like to know a few easy tricks to make our photos look better. With that in mind, I settled on “3 Easy Steps To Make Your Pictures Look Better”! To demonstrate how to do this, I was going to use the Picasa Photo Editor because I like it, know it and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s the best free photo editor around.
The beach seemed to go on for miles and miles
The 3 Picasa Tools I chose to demonstrate were “I’m Feeling Lucky”, “Saturation” and “Sharpen”. These tools are pretty much automatic and can dramatically improve underexposed or poorly lit shots with just a click of the mouse. To demonstrate this, I selected about a dozen original pics of mine that were of pretty poor quality to show how these 3 Picasa Tools enhanced these photos so that they looked pretty good.
So, just before 1pm, I packed up my laptop and headed up to the clubhouse to get all setup for this 1 hour session. I have a cable that plugs into the back of the big widescreen TV that allows everyone to see what’s going on without peering at a small computer screen.
Marina Dunes State Beach
Usually, there are about 12 to 15 people who show up for this class. Yesterday was different – nobody showed up at all. I waited for about 10 minutes and then packed up. Where was everyone? I chalked it up to 2 possibilities:
- The RV Park Golf Championship was held yesterday and maybe a lot of the computer types are also golfers.
- Word got around that I was going to be the substitute computer instructor and all the usual attendees suddenly became golfers, or caddies, or had dentist appointments.
Anyway, I’m off the hook now and I’ll be ready with a good excuse for next time. Instead of talking about Picasa and answering questions for an hour, I went back to our RV, changed into my bathing suit and headed back to the pool for a nice afternoon in the sun – a much better use of my time as far as I’m concerned.
Have a great Tuesday, and thanks again for visiting!
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