It has been a gruelling weekend and I am exhausted. Sometimes, I write to get things off my chest. Writing about recent events while they are fresh in memory, seems to be a way of letting it get out of my head and on to the screen and gives me a feeling of having transferred the event out of working memory! It is cathartic in its own way.
The easy post first.. our hike this morning to Bear Creek and Madrone Knoll. Our friends have done this (as has San) multiple times apparently on days I skipped in the past. So today was my day to visit this trail. It was a steady gradient and I did stop a few times to catch my breath. Took us 3 hours and we did almost 8 miles with a few stops for me to catch up. It also started raining when we went to the top. Most of the places, the rain was up in the canopy, but there were a few spots where we got to walk in rain.
It was beautiful, even though there were no lakes or active creeks in this trail. The weather was pleasant after it started raining, but I was already sweating profusely prior to that and it made for a tropical feeling!
The trees in the trail are amazing. Some of the tallest redwoods we have seen in local parks.
We did not take selfies.. San was mostly ahead of me. Had got 3 hours sleep last night and not much the night before. Was going to back out of the hike this morning, but decided to sleep walk through the first part of the hike and that is pretty much what I did!
A quick clip to capture the essense of this trail today!
Now that I have started typing, can write the rest of the posts..
Now that San is back to her usual self, hiking program has restarted. This morning the group went to Skyline ridge and went throught the Ipiwa trail after walking along the horseshoe trail. We went to Russian ridge from Skyline ridge and were about to go to the view point, but turned back as the smoke from the north east got to the hills we were walking on. At one point the air quality was making it difficult for us to breathe and we turned back after going half mile from the Russian ridge trail starting point.
It was still a good 2 1/2 hours of hiking and we had fun chatting all the way..
Here are some pictures, starting with the usual selfies with my girl!
That is not fog. It is smoke from local fires setting down. Air quality was an issue today!
The best part of this trail was not the lake. It was the view point from the trail where the hillsides were almost 8 different colors with the different plants..
Thank you Gene Sheehan for making this trail! Absolutely gorgeous!
The entire hill side was colorful on both sides of the trail. A great picture spot!
"Suvaru irundhaa dhan chittiram ezhudha mudiyum" is a Tamizh saying which means "without a canvas there is no painting". My neighbor took this shot and she composed it perfectly. All I had to do was crop it and brighten the foreground!
Almost bald is an inbetween look. I am just waiting for the few hairs to drop off naturally. It is not very far away.
We will probably go to this place from a different parking lot and go through Russian Ridge. We have hit one trail after another on this path over the last year.. Quarry creek, Sanborn, Saratoga Gap, Castle rock, Long Ridge, Skyline Ridge, Russian Ridge.. just a few more left to cover in this area.
The group is trying to get me ready to go to Black Mountain which is a 14 mile hike. Let us see if I can get back to hiking more and make it on that hike!
Jr. came back from college but was mostly confined to her room, with her summer coursework. She also switched to a Noon to 3AM schedule, why I don't know. which meant I did not get to spend much time with her.
The only good thing was that I decided to work with her on one of her courses and that gave us a chance to talk more. The little one has been having stomach issues for a month now and we are asked to wait for few more weeks before we get to see a specialist. There is ONE pediatric GI specialist in Kaiser Santa Clara and one in Oakland, if you believe the nurse and appointment center! There seem to be more oncologists than GI specialists which I find interesting! We did spend time together watching Loki. We are both Marvel fans and that helps!
San has just started walking again and that is something. So what I am trying to say in an elaborate way is that this summer was a wash! We wanted to have one day, ONE freaking day where the four of us could go to see some nature, have a good meal outside and just have fun like old times (but with masks on, which I call fun with a mask discount).
We got our chance last evening. The summer courses are over as of last week. There was a good weeks rest. Now there were less excuses. So the kids agreed to sit in the car and drive an hour to SFO for the evening. They got to pick the eating. We got to pick the nature place. Given San has been to lands end many times and I have never seen it, we decided to go and walk down to the ocean.
The hole in the rock out in the ocean does look like a heart from this angle!
It was cold and windy and the place smelled like a sewer and dead fish. God works in mysterious ways. He really does. San swears that in her previous visits, she only smelled the ocean breeze! What we smelled was something to forget but hard to. Every now and then the breeze would come in and cleanse your nose.
The kids kept rolling their eyes going "this is why we don't come out!". We did manage to get a few pictures given this was our one day out. It was beautiful to look at and thankfully photographs don't come with associated smells!
There is also a tunnel you can walk through. However, we took three steps into this thing and realized that it was a smell concentrator. Masks are not enough to walk through this thing. You need a respirator. So we took a selfie and kept moving. This blog is doing a public service. If you just look at the pictures and decide to walk into the tunnel, not good. Read the sentences between the pictures and you can thank me later.
Watching the kids sit there and talk made me think of my brother. We used to be thick as thieves but we rarely speak now. Hope they do better than us when they get to this age!
After spending an hour here, we decided to go to our dinner at Gracias Madre. It is my fourth or fifth time visiting this place and we were in and out in 40 minutes. We came, we ate, we left.
Ghirardelli's is only 15 minutes away and we wrapped up dinner with some dessert.
On the way the kids who usually don't ask for anything asked me to drive there through crooked street, for old times sake and I obliged..they know I don't like to drive there!
I always look forward to that big glass for the hot fudge Sundae and was disappointed to see it served in a plastic cup. The feel of the warm glass and the cold ice cream was lost with the plastic. It is also not easy to scrape off the hot fudge with a plastic spoon from a plastic cup. It is like serving perumal kovil sarkarai pongal in a Crème brûlée ramekin!
The ice cream did taste as good as it always does.The two different textures on my forehead was the subject of an interesting discussion...the shiny part defines the boundary of where hair "used to be" is a theory!
we walked around a bit and drove back!
A video clip..
It was the happiest we have been in a few months! We have to wait till the years end to do the next "family" outing and all plans are already being rejected by the kids.
Sometimes I think all this school and college stuff is taking out the fun for these kids! My sincere hope is that after finishing all this, they get to be more "outdoorsy" and the "travel bug" bites them hard!
I for one will remember this as the one bright evening for the last few months!
