We Go To Alaska For The Afternoon

 We drove south to McHugh Creek where the spring tends to come a little sooner than in Anchorage.  It's good to just get out where there are just trees and mountains and water.  

The trail was sometimes snow, often ice (soft ice because it was well above freezing), dirt, wooden boardwalk, mud, and frozen mud. 

We heard ravens and this was our only sign of moose or bear.

We stopped at Potter Marsh on the way back.  Snow is gone, Water is still mostly ice.  Saw a few gulls.

Good day.  

This And That, Ups And Downs - San Francisco And Seattle

 We're back on Bainbridge Island.  San Francisco was great.  We tried a new rental car option.  Actually we've used BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) and buses in past trips, but we were going to different places over the four days, so a car seemed to make sense. Kyte is a company that delivers the car to you.  And they were cheaper.  Everything worked well except two things.

• They aren't allowed to deliver to the airport so they deliver to Daly City BART.  That's pretty close to the airport and sounded ok.  But it turns out it costs $9 per person one way from SFO to Daly City BART.  So we went to the information office in the airport to get senior BART passes.  In the past a $9 senior BART pass would get us into town and back, plus a trip to see friends in Oakland.  But they aren't selling them at the airport any more.  So the two roundtrips added almost $40 to the bill.
• We were a bit earlier than our appointment and the pick up site is listed as 500 John Daly Blvd.  Well, that includes the entire BART station and two parking lots.  Finding out where we were supposed to be was hard and the driver was late.  

This would be great if we needed to get the car at a residence or anywhere besides SFO.  

Overall, we had a great time visiting good friends on the Peninsula one night and staying with an old Thailand Peace Corps buddy I've known since 1966.  Saturday we walked to the top of Twin Peaks from his house and my son and the two grandkids met us up there.  We spent the rest of the day with them on a glorious sunny T-shirt warm day at Golden Gate Park.  

Twin Peaks involved lots of steps

And flowers - there's a bee in there, but the resolution is too low.  Sorry.

Cool trees.

And birds, like this hummingbird.

And this crow enjoying the view from Twin Peaks

Red tailed hawk?

And for my friend Jeremy, I take pictures of towers like this that interest him much more than the trees or the birds or even the view.  

We also looked at a couple of houses.  My son's family is growing out of the confines of a two bedroom apartment.  It's interesting to visit open houses, but the prices are depressing.  Everything is super staged with furniture, paintings plants.  I discovered it's useful to look behind things - the stagers use items to hide things they don't want you to see.  

Getting altitude is favorite of my grandson.  This was sunny Saturday.

Back in Golden Gate Park Sunday, but it was cloudy and windy and chilly.  That didn't stop the kids from having a great time.  

Monday was sunny again and we had more park time.  Even though it was a much smaller park, there was enough room to play monster and the kids were good at changing the rules if they thought they were going to get caught.  

Broken glass, from my experience, is not an uncommon sight in San Francisco.  This is at a bus stop.  

Dropping off the car was much easier than picking it up and we got to the airport with plenty of time.  An advantage to walking instead of taking the sky train is getting to see the art exhibits all through the terminals.  

Most of these Tabitha Soren pieces didn't excite me, but I did like "Emailed Kiss Goodnight".

This should be larger and clearer if you click on it.

Alison Saar's Flourish

Thought this was interesting.  This isn't far from where my son lives now.  Filmore near Geary.

Finally, we got to our gate and had some ramen.  And I also finally had some time for yesterday's Wordle.  So I started with RAMEN.  

I got two right - one green one yellow -  and I figured I'd try to go through the possible words and make it in two or three tries. 

But as I discovered when we got off the plane and onto the ferry in Seattle, that I'd used the wrong letter as the yellow (A instead of R) one.  An almost totally wasted turn given the two words I'd boiled it down to - ABBEY and ALLEY.  For the first time I got it only on the sixth round.  Bummer.  

But I made up for it today with 99.99% luck.  

Meanwhile, it was 54˚ F in the condo when we got back last night.  A good part of the trip was being away while we waited for the plumber to fix the boiler.  And they called this morning to see if it was ok to come earlier.  YES!

But then they reported it needed parts they had to order.  The fireplace and the two space heaters we got have gotten it into the low 60s.  Oh, and there was fresh snow on the ground.  The weather app reported 32F on Bainbridge and 40F in Anchorage.

So, that's all you missed while I've been gramping instead of blogging.

Oh, my book club met last night.  It was a book I just couldn't finish. Reading it wasn't fun nor was it telling me anything I needed to know.  I didn't want to keep reading.  But that's a different post.  

Sun And Rain In LA Keep Me Distracted

 There's been a lot of rain here in LA.  For LA anyway.  It was one day rain, the next day sun, then rain.  We just finished two days of steady rain, but today the sun's out.  But with all this, trying to be on vacation yet get things done and gramping, I totally missed Wednesday's hearing.  And while the Superior court has it live on video, they don't leave the recorded (was it recorded?) video up for people to see later.  But they're still talking technical, procedural stuff.  Though listening in would have given me some hints of things might go.  Next meeting is next Wednesday.  But meanwhile here's some LA.

Sunday was sunny and I went for a bike ride with B, an Alaskan friend who's moved down here to be near kids and grandkids.  He took this picture of a house in Marina Del Rey.  This is NOT a typical house.  

It had this sign in the lower left.

Some gentlemen fishing at the boat docks in Marina del Rey.  

Monday morning it was still sunny, but clouds were rolling in as we went to Will Rogers State Park for a hike back into my earlier life.  This is where Will Rogers lived.  His house is there and there's a polo field that's active on weekends.  And also a trail that loops around the property.  

The rain was a fine mist by this point.

All tree bark fascinates me, but eucalyptus trees hold a special place

Here's Will Roger's stable/barn in the wet Monday.

And here it is when it was finished in 1927.

One of the things I like about this park is that it's surrounded by chaparral covered hills.  A smell that takes me back to childhood.  I think it might be why I like David Hockney's swimming pool picture, which I once had to recreate digitally in a computer art class I took.  It was painted at a house not far from here with hills like this in the background. I want you all to know I really liked this picture well before it sold for $100 million.  

In the past when I've hiked this trail I've seen coveys of California quail.  But not this time. 

It was raining when we went to the cemetery to put flowers on my mom's and other family members' graves.  When my brother died young, my mother went to the cemetery weekly to keep fresh flowers from her garden on his space on the wall.  My mom was a lab technician and X-ray technician and so she filled test tubes with water and taped them to the wall.  Many years later, the cemetery got plastic vases and put holders up on the wall.  My inlaws and step father were added to the wall, and more recently my mom.  So when I'm down here I gather flowers - mainly epidendrum, what my mom called 'poor man's orchids' and jade plants - because the last longer.  

A couple of years ago I filled some of the vases with soil and put  jade plant in.  When we came again nearly a year later, they were still alive.  One of the cemetery caretakers was making sure they got water.  Because of COVID I wasn't sure what I would find this time.  We haven't been there for almost two years.  But I shouldn't have worried.  Each vase had a healthy jade plant, one had a different succulent, alive and thriving.  We added the flowers we brought and I have to leave a thank you for the caregiver before we return to Anchorage.

Nearby my mom's spot is this one.  

Yesterday it was raining again.  I had an appointment in Beverly Hills with the eye doctor who's been checking my contacts since 1975.  I took my granddaughter with me and she had a number of questions.  

They had a COVID testing site in the parking lot.  

And most of the nearby shops (but not all) had very COVID warnings.

oops, this one needed higher res, sorry

These were near where we parked the car and I thought they were pretty.  Picture didn't turn out that well.

After we went by a park where both my wife and I attended summer camp.  We didn't know each other then at all.  We only found out we'd both been there when I found an old camp picture in my mom's garage, after she died.  I should my wife my 8 year old self and she then pointed out her own image on the picture.  

They've take out most of the features that made it a wonderful place for kids - different spaces separated by different kinds of bushes and a swimming pool on one end.  The pool is gone - the the playground there was blocked off yesterday by tape because there were several inches of water.  This trail was the nicest part of the park now - and it was a giant puddle.  Basically they wiped out all the park and put in two baseball diamonds.  

And driving home down Olympic, the clouds were playing hide and seek with the tops of the buildings in Century City.  

Today's sunny again, and so we have a bike ride scheduled.  We got the brakes fixed on my granddaughter's bike and she wants to use it.  

Beautiful Day For Hike Along Eklutna Lake

 Didn't get to the keyboard until about 5:30 pm today because we went to Eklutna Lake to take advantage of the beautiful day.  Maybe low 70s, sunny with some decorative clouds.  And it's a Tuesday so it shouldn't be crowded.  And it wasn't.  Although it's not far (maybe 20 miles away) we haven't been there since our kids were little.  Just going to offer you some pictures.  

Looking north.  We started near the low point on the left.  

Looking South

People in the canoe are not us.  They just paddled by while we were on the shore having lunch.