A dusting of snow.

Tahoe

via Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/B3BegZ0gWyT/

Beautiful California

Found this amazing time lapse video made by Hal Bergman.

Bergman wrote that his goal was to “cram all of the visually stunning things about the entire state, from coastline to mountains to deserts, from cities to wilderness and national parks, into four minutes.” This time lapse took Bergman over four years to make and the average clip in it took between three and ten hours to edit. (via Bold Italic).



You'll see the building where we live at 2:33. Can you find it? :)

Marching On

Saying goodbye to the 3rd month of 2014...how quickly it flew by! Here are a few snapshots of my March...
Gandhi Statue at the Ferry Building.

Taxi and bike turning onto Market Street.

My brother-in-law works here.

Sunset on March 15th. Too cold for me to dip my toes in. Jimmy's braver than me.

Same day as above, only about an hour before. The fog lifted just in time for sunset.

A different day, the setting sun glowing on Alcatraz.

That apartment building fire was the opposite side of the ballpark from us but we could see the black smoke from our living room window. We drove by the devastation one Saturday afternoon.

Today, the last day of the month. Cold, windy, stormy. Raining sideways, umbrellas barely made a difference.

Paula Cole was in Berkeley on the 27th and we saw her at an awesome venue called Freight and Salvage. We had front row seats. No photos allowed during the performance, but I got one of her afterwards signing cd's.

Practicing barre chords. They are hard but I love them for some reason. I think because they are challenging. Although every part of learning the guitar is challenging. And rewarding. And that half gold dinosaur makes me laugh. Who would buy that??

Yes guitar is taking up most of my creative energy right now. But I still managed to do a decent bit of paper crafting too.



Our drive to the hideaway was gorgeous last weekend. A beautiful sunny spring day where our normally golden brown hills were fresh green.



California poppies.

A new friend...shy at first...

but as curious about us as we were about her.

Then just a day and a half later, we had just a little bit of snow on the ground.


"The March wind roars
Like a lion in the sky,
And makes us shiver
As he passes by.
When winds are soft,
And the days are warm and clear,
Just like a gentle lamb,
Then spring is here."
- Author Unknown

The Drive

We've gotten in the habit of putting our GoPro camera on our dashboard and taking either video or a photo of the trip every 5 seconds. When we get home, Jimmy combines all those images, this time over 3000 before the battery died, into a video. Then I take it, edit out the long pauses when we stop and nothing is changing, do a bit of cropping so the car is mostly out of frame and finding music that's approximately the same length of the video and sort of matches the mood/theme/pace of it.

Here's our video from our Memorial Day Drive with our friend John.
click on the 'youtube' icon on the bottom right of the video to make it bigger.

Point Bonita and Back

Our 4 hour trip condensed into 2 1/2 minutes.
Hope you don't get carsick.

Watching the Sunset on Our Anniversary

Today was a good day. It was the 1st warm weekend we've had in over a month so lots of people were out enjoying the sun.
We celebrated our 22nd anniversary exploring a different part of the coast, just north of The City.

We headed to Point Bonita in the Marin Headlands where the views were spectacular on this clear day.

We've never seen the Golden Gate Bridge from this vantage point.

We wanted to visit the Point Bonita Lighthouse but after a short hike, we arrived 15 minutes after they closed. No bother, it was a gorgeous day and we were going to enjoy it.

We had about an hour before sunset and we wanted to be down on that beach to watch it.

Windswept, exhilarating, and covered with unique red and green pebbles, Rodeo beach is sheltered by cliffs and bounded by a lagoon. It offers good picnic sites and is ideal for kite flying or just watching the roaring Pacific. Attentive beach-walkers may see (but must not collect) jasper, carnelian, black agate, and jade among the beach sands. Two military forts once guarded these shores. Fort Barry and Fort Cronkhite—whose structures now serve as National Park Service facilities—were once nerve centers of Marin Headlands military activities long ago.

When we got there, we had about 30 minutes to enjoy the views before the sun "touched" water.

We weren't the only ones with this idea. This was a beautiful beach and we were happy to finally discover it.


Fort Cronkhite, a former World War II military post located in the Marin Headlands, is the park's best preserved example of a World War II "mobilization post". Starting in 1939, the U.S. Army built hundreds of similar wood-frame, temporary military posts around the country for the wartime training and housing of soldiers. By some estimates, more than 100,000 of these buildings were constructed between 1940 and 1945.
The buildings at Fort Cronkhite, completed in 1941, are typical of thousands of wartime barracks, mess halls, supply buildings once constructed from coast to coast. Fort Cronkhite originally housed hundreds of Coast Artillery soldiers assigned to the army's sprawling Harbor Defenses of San Francisco. Their mission was to protect San Francisco Bay against enemy attack and during World War II, the soldiers manned gun batteries, radar sites, and other fortifications on the high ridges overlooking the fort.



Almost there.

What a sky!

Just about disappeared into the horizon.

A fitting end to a fantastic day.

Speedy drive to Point Reyes

I got a new camera for Christmas that's ideal for action videos. We'll probably mostly use it at the hideaway on the Rhino, but we decided to play around with it during our drive up to Point Reyes last week. this is a super sped up version of various clips of the drive up.
Click on the "Full Screen" icon at the bottom right of the video to get a better view.

Road Trip: Point Reyes

We took advantage of MLK Jr day and headed north for a little road trip. We've only been north of the Golden Gate Bridge once since we've moved here and I've been chomping at the bit for us to do some exploring.
We started off in San Francisco. Our first stop was at Muir Beach. Then we drove though Stinson Beach to Point Reyes and Drakes Bay. Then had dinner in Petaluma before heading back home.

Driving north over the Golden Gate Bridge.

Our first stop at Muir Beach Overlook. Didn't really overlook the beach, but this is the view south looking back at the city.

Zooming in to Sutro Tower atop Twin Peaks.

Looking north from Muir Beach Overlook.

Thats us! Windy day and a lot colder than it looks. We both should have had jackets on. One lady even commented on how Jimmy was wearing short sleeves and she was in a big coat and she was freezing.

Stinson Beach. Maybe the prettiest beach in California. It would have been nice to stop, but even though it had been over 15 years since we'd been there, we wanted to explore uncharted territory. We've never driven past Stinson Beach on Highway 1 before so we just enjoyed the views as we drove through.

California Happy Cows.

Looking south at South Beach on the coast side of Point Reyes.

Looking north at North Beach on the coastal side of Point Reyes.

Drakes Bay looking at Point Reyes. Drakes Bay is named after Sir Francis Drake.

How cool is this?!!? We saw a herd of Tule Elk as we were leaving Drakes Bay.

The big guy on the right was clearly in charge of this herd.

After dinner in Petaluma, a small farming town known for it's butter and eggs, we headed back home.
But we stopped at Fort Baker to take a few photos of the bridge.

Then went over to the Marin Headlands to get a few shots of the city lights behind it.

California Happy Cows Commercial.