- California, Independent travel, North America, Outdoor Activities, Photography, Travel Blog, USA, Walking, Wildlife
California: Chill Time Before We Head Home
Underfoot the ground is parched, rock hard and dusty, the sun shines hot from crystal skies and occasional breezes rustle the trees and send dust clouds up into small eddies while only marginally cooling the heat. Tufts of weed and grass remain but seem to be turning to pale yellow by the hour, some already sun kissed enough to disintegrate into more dust if we step on them. It’s all very different from the verdant forests and regular rain of the last three weeks. Spring is turning into summer into the mountains above Los Angeles. Acton, the small town which is my daughter Lindsay’s home, receives its hot days of…
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More Tales From American Bars
In our short stay in the well heeled wine country town of Napa we were to fall in love with Downtown Joe’s, one of many bars around the World which have etched themselves into our travel memories. Our first call there though was ahead of the fun of nighttime and was instead in the bright afternoon sunshine, outdoors rather than in its welcoming interior. As ever, it doesn’t take long to get into conversation, the guy in the Santana T-shirt at the next table was soon in conversation, welcoming us to the state he loves and interested to know who we are, where we come from. Not long into our…
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Tales From American Bars: Barstow CA
We could have guessed that Barstow was going to be an experience. Just approaching the town down the wide, sloping highway gives a sense of being somewhere different, as the sun baked town creeps outwards to fill the shallow basin in the otherwise barren desert. From Barstow it’s many miles to anywhere, its nearest neighbours being a long drive away across the unforgiving desert which stretches to the horizon in every direction. Heat hazes shimmer above the asphalt and the early evening sun, still blistering and intense, creates dazzling reflections in windows and windshields. The broad main highway sprouts giant signs – McDonalds, Starbucks, Home Depot, Chevrolet and no win…
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Looking Back And Planning Forward
Our garden looks strange as we take our first look at it after 12 weeks away. So much has died in the unusually hot and dry summer, but the heavy rain which has now fallen in the last few days has turned all the dead stuff into an untidy grey. Green patches try their best, but there is precious little colour and the whole garden looks a kind of damp monochrome with splashes of green paint. Within minutes of our arrival home, we are alerted to the drama unfolding at Balmoral and, around four hours later, the Queen’s death is confirmed. As the BBC plays the national anthem Michaela and…
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Rocks, Trees & Fault Lines: Back Into California
When you imagine temperatures of over 110F (43C), you picture blistering sunshine and the need to find shade, yet for a good part of our drive across the desert from the Grand Canyon to Joshua Tree, the temperature gauge is up there above that number yet the skies are consistently overcast. It even rains a couple of times. When we step out of the car for a break, we are hit by a wall of heat incompatible with the cloudy skies above. Leaving the Interstate 140, we drive south west through some extraordinarily barren country, miles of dead straight road through open land. Once past the salt flats at Amboy…
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A Ghost Town, Route 66 And Rock ‘n’ Roll: Yosemite-Barstow-Arizona
It’s not hard to work out why we chose the town of Barstow, and the Route 66 Motel, as our overnight stay on our longest drive of this trip. A Route 66 town? Route 66 Motel? Classic cars preserved in the motel grounds…why wouldn’t you?? The route from Yosemite to Barstow is ridiculously diverse: first the mountains of Yosemite, then the richly verdant fruit farm regions, then the flatlands as the world becomes more and more spartan. Once past Bakersfield, Spanish language signs reappear, something we didn’t see to the same extent in Northern California but are commonplace down here. Over the mountains we go, dropping next into the Mojave…
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This Is Yosemite
So many people had told us that Yosemite was fabulous long before we came here, and just about everyone whose advice we sought before planning our California adventure checked that we’d included Yosemite on our itinerary. Then, the guy in the Santana T-shirt at Downtown Joe’s in Napa said that we will never forget seeing Half Dome for the first time. None of this was a case of over selling; in fact, no amount of pre-warning can really prepare you for the unbridled joy of Yosemite. Even before we enter the Park, the drive from our base at “the Bug” to the Park gates is absolutely stunning, following the River…
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From City To Wine Country And On To The Hills
With the delights of San Francisco behind us, we drive into the town of Napa just before lunchtime on that most significant of American days, the fourth of July. Stars and stripes are very much in evidence, bunting and banners adorn the streets and there is a sense of anticipation in the air. The River Napa which flows swiftly through the town and runs directly into San Francisco Bay, once supported heavy industry here, until alternative forms of transport took away its water borne advantages and Napa and its neighbours suffered a downturn. What followed later wasn’t quite the Gold Rush of 1849 but you could conceivably call it the…
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San Francisco #2
For those of us of a certain age, the very words “San Francisco” evoke memories of 1960s music, flower power, the hippy generation and the 1967 summer of love. That entire movement, if movement is the right word, may have been synonymous with the wider city, but it was actually centred around the district of Haight Ashbury, just over a mile west of downtown. A district which was hit hard by the Depression and fell into decline during the 1950s slowly became a haven for the hippy counterculture during the 60s due in the main to the availability of cheap rental accommodation in a downbeat and under populated neighbourhood. Within…
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San Francisco #1
Where do we begin, to describe this exciting, unique city. What makes San Francisco what it is? Is it those incredibly steep streets which look like a tarmac roller coaster, is it the streetcars and cable cars we all associate with the views? Is it THAT bridge, is it THAT prison on its isolated island? Is it the amazing things you can do (and we did) here, is it the bars that just make you want to grab a stool and try all the beers? Chinatown? North Beach? Pier 39? Restaurants at the waterfront? Crazy shit like Lombard Street or Haight Ashbury? Or even the way the fog wraps itself…
