smoke

Liz and I decided to take a couple days away with a trip up to Santa Ynez valley wine country to relax after a stressful couple of months. It was a great time and we came back with a trunk full of vino. The weather was perfect too...until about an hour into our drive back around Ventura, CA...



We had seen news about the fires in Malibu on Sunday morning, but the smoke from those fires was blowing out to sea. We ended up driving right through the thick smoke of a massive fire that was beyond a large ridge from the city of Ventura. These pictures were taken at 2 in the afternoon and it felt like a cross between the feeling of an eclipse and the color palate of a michael bay movie. Very strange indeed. It wasn't until after finally reaching home that we realized the intense wind was fanning huge fires all over the region making this episode nearly as bad, if not worse, than the fires of 2003.