A Satruday Hike In Alaskan Fall. Then Sunday Winter Came

I drive my van even less during the winter than the summer.  Partly because I avoid driving as much as a I can.  But also because we spend more time during winter with grandkids to the south.  We have it parked out of the street so it doesn't block the snowplows while we're gone.  And since we've been gone a while, I felt I should take advantage of the lack of snow, to go for a ride to charge up the battery.  Which is why we got to McHugh Creek.  

The sun made itself known through the clouds.

The total lack of snow or ice in the beginning of November feels weird, but no one was complaining.

Blends of yellows and oranges, with the green of the spruces.  The clouds hanging low, well below the ridge.  A little up the trail, we could see the faint outline of what I suppose is McHugh Peak through the clouds.  

Rocks have various kinds of lichen.   

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And there's still green plant life showing.

"

The cottonwoods are skeletons now, the trunks are ridged, which I've always assumed is a sign they've been around a while.  The cottonwoods in our yard have much smoother trunks.  

We passed Potter Marsh on the way out and saw folks skating.  On the way back we stopped, but the skaters were gone.  These two guys were venturing out in their tennies.  

And then today we woke up to winter.  Nature pays no attention to humans turning their clocks back.  

San Francisco Shots

Went for a walk today with the SF grandkids.  Here ae some things we saw along the way.

The Easy Breezy yogurt shop was the kids' destination.  

They 

They were also checking out the hooded with Halloween decorations.  

 [I'd add that my nine year old grandson talked non-stop the whole way (about two hours) about his Minecraft creations.]

To Chicago, Habrae, Hidden Lake, And Reza's

We're in Chicago with old, old friends.  Actually they aren't older than we are, but we've known them for a long time.  

We thought it would be easy getting here on a non-stop flight out of Anchorage.  For the non-stop route, we were willing to fly overnight.  In the end, after lots of to-ing and fro-ing (one hour delay, get on plane, taxi from gate, sit on tarmac, return to gate, need to fix some mechanical issue,  some people want to get off because they've already missed their Chicago connections, then everyone told to get off, then several new estimated departure times, then four hours from original flight time, the flight is cancelled) we were quickly put on a 5am flight to Seattle with a tight connection to a Chicago flight, which we made.  And later we got an email with a $200 credit for each of us on future Alaska Airlines flights.  For people who were soured by Alaska Airlines because of these delays, it's a bittersweet reward.  But for people dependent on Alaska Airlines like we are, it's a decent apology gift.  

But our friends were patient on their end and got us to a great Thai restaurant in Oak Park for dinner and home to crash.  

We shared sticky rice and mango for dessert.

Thursday they took us to Hidden Lake.  It's in DuPage County and abuts the Arboretum.  

They were trying to get us somewhere that got us into woods without too many urban distractions.  

And they did a pretty good job.  The trees are so different from Anchorage trees.  No spruce, no birch, no cottonwood.  Not sure what they all were, but it felt exotic to this Alaskan.  It seemed there were some maples.  Probably in the arboretum there would have been labels, but we just wanted to walk around and enjoy.  A few trees are just beginning to turn, but barely.  Temps in the low 70s.  And lots of birds, but for the most part not easy to catch with the camera.  I think the one below is a flicker, but I'm not completely sure.  

Lots of late flowers like this clover.

But there is a villain in this story.  

These are the same white flowers, but they weren't quite in focus so I played with Curves to get this version.  

And then we lucked out on dinner.  We'd passed a sign for Reza's on the way.  Sounded like a Middle Eastern place.  Even better, it turned out to be Persian and we had a delicious dinner with an accommodating waiter, and lots to take home for lunch today.  This one was a chicken kabob.  

Harbor Walk And A South African Lawyer

Yesterday I took a walk down to the harbor here on Bainbridge Island.  

 And on my way back I did a double take when I saw this fairly mature palm tree.  Don't see a lot of them as far north as Seattle.  But All About Palm Trees tells there are some:

Palm Trees In Washington

 

There are specific varieties of cold hardy palm trees that can survive zones 8 and 9 of Washington state. Here are palm trees that can live in Washington: 

 

California Fan Palm Tree – Zones 8b - 11 (15 to 20 F) 

Canary Island Date Palm Tree – Zones 8b - 11 (15 to 20 F) 

Chinese Fan Palm Tree – Zones 8a – 11 (10 to 15 F) 

True Date Palm Tree – Zones 8b - 11 (15 to 20 F) 

European Fan Palm Tree – Zones 7b – 11 (5 to 10 F) 

Mexican Fan Palm Tree – Zones 8b - 11 (15 to 20 F) 

Queen Palm Tree – Zones 8b - 11 (15 to 20 F) 

Saw Palmetto Palm Tree – Zones 7a - 11 (0 to 5 F) 

But none of these quite look like the one in the picture.

And the South African lawyer.

My book club met tonight to discuss The Promise by Damon Galgut.  It won the 2021 Booker Prize. There were interesting things about it, but each of the  four parts involved a death and a funeral starting before Independence and then continuing afterward.  No one's life seemed to improve.  But there were a number of sentences with great imagery.  So I just wanted to share two:

"She's not so far advanced in matters of the spirit not to recognize the sound of a rare opportunity clearing its throat."

"The lawyer has amplified over the years, in harmony with her burgeoning practice.  Consumed two husbands along the way and still lazily digesting then. like a python in hibernation."

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.