Ralph Bishop museum visit
The field trip is led by Tyrone LaFay with VGMS (909-802-9177 or biotribecascadia@yahoo.com).

This is limited to 16 persons, if we have robust signups, we may plan a second trip for another day.

Sunday morning at 9 AM, July 20, we will meet at the residence of Ralph Bishop located at 618 E. Cook Street, in the city of Santa Maria, CA. This is a residential neighborhood and off street parking is available, please do not block any driveways. Best route is to take Main Street off US 101 and head west, make a left on College Ave., and a right on Cook St, finding parking along Cook Street.

We will collect ourselves on his driveway. He will lead the tours of his museum which occupies an entire large garage on the premises, 5 folks at a time, there will be 3 "shifts", each lasting about 20 minutes. This will start at 9:15 AM. He may have some minerals for sale on tables outside of the museum for those of us waiting for our turn. The range of old world high end materials that Ralph possesses would take pages to list. Ralph has been an avid rockhound his entire life and will regale you with many true stories about his experiences. Many of his works are in other museums around the country. He asks that folks do not take photographs while inside his museum.

After all 3 groups have been through the museum and completed our purchases, we will mobilize to Avila Beach, about 35 minutes further north. There a minus tide (-0.59 FT) condition will exist at 12:11 PM. Parking can be challenging, so carpooling is recommended, but it is a relatively short distance to collect the rare Deedeeite. I will have examples to show folks so they can calibrate their eyes to what they should be looking for. The trip will end about 2:00 PM as the tide begins to roll back in, giving us a few hours to properly hound the DeeDeeite.

Easy late lunch spots along the way include In and Out Burger off Stowall Rd in Santa Maria, or my favorite burger joint, Charlie's Place, in Los Alamos about 15 minutes south of Santa Maria, with a full menu of burgers and sandwiches in large portions.