When you visit a place more than 20 times..

We visited "The Mystery Spot" in Santa Cruz for the 20+ th time with the BIL family on the way to Monterey beach.

Think I toppped the number of visits list on this group by a wide margin. I was not alone in visiting this place multiple times. There were other folks who were bringing family and friends for the 10th or 14th time.

Still this place never loses the wonder it brings.. you get to experience something different and weird for that 30 minutes. The high school and college kids who act as guides for this 30 minute tour try to one up their jokes and now they have a cafeteria outside as well! So the place is doing well.

we checked the level.. it is still almost the same after 20 years.. not much earth movement! 

Here is BIL doing the MJ thing..

and if you are wondering what happens at the mystery spot... we start walking with a lean without realizing it. the video below says it all..

The outside has some decor added with a couple of cars completely covered in mystery spot stickers and bunch of US flags now and that adds a little color to the entry!

Something tells me we will be visiting this place again in a few years when more guests show up!

Our new Favorite spot- Lovers point park

We had visited this park in Monterey right after San realized she could only limp along for a few days. Lovers point park is perfect to park right near the beach, get down just 15 steps and get your feet wet in the waves. 

When the BIL's family visited, we made another trip to the park..

We made it in the evening and it was overcast and almost started drizzling after we spent an hour at the beach.. so we made it back home with a nice dinner at Los Gatos in a Mexican place. 

Here are some pictures from the outing..

I started doing a yoga pose.. but the wind was stronger than last visit and I was not that confident of my balance.. so abandoned the attempt halfway..

Then a gull came and sat next to me.. very close to me. Must be a very sociable gull.. so I took a Gullfie..

and here is the "making of the Gullfie" shot from Jr. 

the star of the show..

I think it has been trained to pose.. maybe it expected me to hand it food after posing for photos.. dont know!

We had fun in the waves..

We will be making many more visits to this place over the years is our guess.

Love this beach!

Lovers point Park - Monterey

Given San is still on the restricted ankle regimen and wanted to go somewhere, anywhere.. we went to the easiest accessible beach, at Lovers point park in Monterey.

It is a 90 minute drive from here, but totally worth the drive. The weather was perfect there, a good 15 degrees cooler. We parked right next to the park, walked around the park and went down to the beach and got our feet wet.. 

My photographer is getting better every day!

There is a carpet of pink flowers everywhere, which makes for great pictures! 

we had to dry our feet before wearing shoes again.. so we just sat on a bench and watched the waves and seagulls and the incredibly human friendly gophers that were everywhere! they even beg for food on two legs and that was scary to watch!

I also got to climb on the rocks here and there and try yoga poses. Not recommending this to others as it was a risky move.. was in the moment and shocked my wife by trying to do this on top of the rock.. by the time she started to protest in terror, was out of the pose.. 

Long exposure trick on the waves.. 

slowly getting the hang of this.. have to go wider as the long exposure adjustment crops the picture!

Some pictures from the park and beach!

and what is a blog post without a short video?

Had a lot of fun in two hours and drove back! Definitely recommend it for a short walk in a scenic setting!

The treacherous trail

Last week we went on what was to date the most challenging hike in post covid times. This was the Gray Whale cove trail at McNee ranch that starts from the Montara state beach. This is right on the other edge of the Devils slide that we had visited last year. 

The trail started with an almost straight climb of 1000+ feet in one go with not many foot holds in places. Then it went up from there. It was 1800 feet elevation to North Peak point which merges with the Golden Gate park on the other side.

The views as we went up were okay as the fog was rolling in and it was direct sunlight. The views while coming back were just plain amazing. Route 1 is the most scenic as the sun goes down! everything just jumps up at you with the added color!

Have a lot of good pictures from this hike. So going to share a select few here and make the rest a slideshow!

There is a 15 minute detour on the way back from the North Peak to another trail in the Golden Gate park where you get to see this cave! It was a risk we took to go on this detour.. we had to get back before it got dark. We went on a new moon night and were aware of the risk of having to come down in the dark.

The lupines in blue white and purple were everywhere and made for amazing scenic landscapes. It was purple irises, lupines or yellow flowers on the hillsides.. 

You climb straight up to get to this single tree..

then you climb up some more to get to this level (that tree in the photo is in the end of the path in this photo). Climbing up is difficult but climbing down on the other path was even more challenging as at some points it was just 3 foot drops! we had to crawl on our butt to get down. 

The stress levels were running high as we were running down against a setting sun. The more tempting it was to stop for pictures, the more we realized this was going to be very challenging for the last mile..

we made it down post sunset, had some well deserved chai and drove back. This is a trail that we will not recommend to folks who are not fit, take kids in the group, folks without hiking shoes.. 

Better wear a miners helmet in case you get delayed getting down.. or better still do this hike early morning or start at 2PM! 

It was challenging but we enjoyed the company and got some great pictures! so a two thumbs up in the end!

On a side note, I did get the second shot of the vaccine, went through the side effects and in good enough shape to write a blog to distract myself from the headache. 

COVID is giving us all an experience to remember! Happy to have this hiking group in our life right now!

SFO-day trip- Painted steps

This is a continuation of yesterday's post on the San Francisco day trip to Presidio Park and the hike on Lover's lane. 

After our lunch at Gracias Madre, we went to visit the Painted steps on 16th avenue also refered to as the Painted Mosaic or Tiled steps. 

This is our second visit the steps and I remembered visiting the steps within a few months after they had just been created and opened to the public. We had visited this with San's cousins family and had a lot of fun taking pictures. Kept searching the blog and found nothing! Then saw a few photos from FB. Then spent an hour trying to figure out why I never posted anything, or if it was one of those things where the submit button was never pressed!

Turns out our first visit was on Labor day of 2014. That 4th of July was my fateful trip to India (the plane with engine failure trip as I call it), followed by a last minute trip to Jaipur, flying to Taiwan with 3 hour window after landing in Mumbai, coming back to bay area only to realize MIL had a cancer scare, presenting at a conference while all this was going on.. it was a rollercoaster of a month and somehow, there was a "post backlog"! This photo stood out!

Looking back we visited the hidden garden stairs which was done in 2013. There are three such tiled steps in SFO. Two around 16th street and one 4 miles away in Lincoln park. We visited the two steps in 16th street yesterday.

The first one goes up from Moraga and 16th up a block. It is beautiful and has no bends. you can see all the way to the top. Once you go to the top, you go right a hundred feet and there is another step that leads up to the next street and a staircase that takes you to the top of that hill. 

The views from this point are amazing! you see the ocean, downtown, the layers of buildings on the hill and it takes your breath away!

This is from the top after climbing the 16th avenue steps. 

Once you go to vista point two roads up you see this..

Once we spent some time at the top, we came back down to 16th Avenue and after walking two blocks, we walked down the hidden garden steps. This one bends around and is also very beautiful. 

Took some pictures on the stairs.. (San did take some pictures of me for a change and that moment was captured!)

We had some homemade tea and snacks, courtesy of our friends and drove back. San Francisco is beautiful and we suburbanites have not explored this big city at all. Having lived here for more than 2 decades, we have come to the realization that there is plenty of sight seeing left to do in SFO!

We can do it, one vista point at a time!