landscapes

Hiking the Lonely Forest trail in La Honda Open Space Preserve

This weekend, we hiked the La Honda Open space preserve. It is a 30 minute ride from Cupertino and we found parking at the trail head easily. Not many hikers as there was a mist and slight drizzle and a lot of fog on the way.

Reminded me of Windy hill which is also somewhere close by. Weather was good and parts of the hike were in the shade. It actually got quite warm when we went to the base of the vista point.

The normal trail for this place is the Harrington trail. Our friend Deepa, who will henceforth be known as “Lone forest Deepa” made such a pitch for this newly opened trail which would take us to Coho Vista point , that we decided to take a chance and follow her “pdf map” instead of all trails. We went through this trail which had no one on it, to the Madrone trail, then to the starting point for the vista. It was another 1.1 miles one way to the top and we were out of time. So we had chai and came back. Here is a Link to Deepa’s capture of the trail..

It was 9 miles, 1700 feet climb and took us 4 hours including the Chai and photo breaks. We will definitely revisit this in spring when there are flowers. Given this is a new trail we had to watch out for a large stretch. Lots of salamanders and lizards, slugs etc. crossing the trail in the morning.

Here are some pictures..

There were no benches though for a “bench photo”!

Very short video highlight reel..

Definitely recommended for a half day hike on a foggy day! Once you go up it is just beautiful!

Positano in the Amalfi Coast - Vertical village

The previous post in this series is here..

After Jr.’s scaring us with her health the previous night post kayaking into the sunset, we tried to get her back in shape with EmergenC, tylenol etc. and by morning she was in better shape.

We had one last breakfast at the Angelino Hotel, said bye to the staff. Loaded our luggage and started driving to Positano. It was a tense drive on windy roads along the coast. Once we reached Positano we found a paid parking garage and walked the entire vertical village up and down a few times.

Thoroughly enjoyed the churches, the lanes, the cute shops, and had a fabulous pasta lunch.

The gallery of photos , mostly in portrait format..

A video highlights reel..

Then we walked back in the hot sun to the car. It was already close to 2 PM when we started. The original plan was to go sleep in Naples close to the airport and catch the early morning flight out. Given the heat and need for some chai, we skipped the gelato plan and drove straight to Naples.

Positano was amazing. It felt like an action replay of Sorrento at placed but the vertical village has its own charm! Do not miss visiting Positano if you go on a trip to the Sorrento area.

Imagination point and Pink Valley- Kapadokya, Turkey

The previous post in this series is here.. The reason I put this link is because sometimes there are trips before other trips can be blogged and this thing looks like the Inception movie. Hopefully the links help in stitching together a timeline. Squarespace seems to have become bad at searching and showing the right results in the blog in recent times. Think their new AI is trying to understand the blog timelines and went “screw this guy.. too jumpy in his timelines”

Where were we? Yes.. After that pottery stop and lunch we went and stopped at Imagination point, a place where the rock formations are very interesting, followed by another stop at Pink Valley. This is apparently close to where the balloons land. Our driver used a back route to get us to an unofficial view point. It was 100+ degrees out and we wanted to get out and right back in after taking pictures. That was the plan till I decided to do Yoga poses overlooking Pink Valley. The rest of the group went back into the van, but my darling wife did stay back to help take photos.

Short video highlight reel

After this we were going to be on a longer drive. So folks took a nap while we went to our next big stop which was the biggest tour highlight!