The CATS conference turned out okay; the San Luis Obispo campus is quite pretty, since it's located in a small rural town in a valley surrounded by green hills (at least this time of year). It's also an ag school, so they have a rather extensive arboretum and quite a few large fields surrounding campus. The weirdest thing was all the high-tech multimedia labs in the same building that housed the dairy department and some other ag sections.

Only a couple hundred people attend this gathering, and I didn't get much out of it, but it was good to be away from regular work for a week. Our train ride up passed without incident, but the train coming back was delayed three hours, so they put us on a bus to Santa Barbara where we caught a different train the rest of the way, arriving home about the same scheduled time.

Thursday afternoon we all played hookey and drove a couple miles to Pismo Beach and hiked on the white sand and chowed down on some excellent clam chowder. We saw a very large dead sea lion on the beach -- just a pile of blubber with some bones protruding.

We had nothing scheduled for that evening, so we drove into town for the weekly evening farmer's market, but it soon got rained out, although not before I found a local wineshop selling Liquid Love (a late-harvest Riesling dessert wine) and The Mutt (a local blend of a number of different kinds of grapes that looks interesting).