More traveling in the United States

My parents didn't limit their traveling to overseas trips. They loved seeing America. In 1973 they took a nostalgic trip back to California to see long-time friends. On that trip, Hardie painted "Rocks at Carmel" and wrote the following:

"We wanted to bring back paintings filled with the charm of the Pacific. To be sure, the Big Sur coast is a dramatic place ... but there was nothing in the spectacular that was intimate and personal, nothing that intrigued me as a subject.

"Then we stayed with a cousin in Carmel ... A trip along the 'Seventeen Mile Drive' changed our minds. Rounding a turn just above Pebble Beach we had our subject before us. There it was, and with all the excitement of the sea close enough at hand. Water moved in magnificent whirls around formidable looking rocks. The shape and design of masses in the foreground could be arranged only by Mother Nature herself. Cézanne himself couldn't ask for a more perfect composition, even to that beautiful reserve color of the sea flowers." [From comments written to son-in-law Kendall B. Smith in December 1988]

On that trip they stayed with old friends Betty and Phil Dike (another founder of the California Watercolor Movement) in their cabin in Cambria and had the most wonderful reunion, even with a bat flying around their bedroom in the middle of the night.