Merry Christmas

coco and tater

No sound track, but this is Coco carrying 2 tennis balls.

Fishing

This is a sheepshead, if I remember correctly.

It fought hard and had a lot of teeth in its mouth.

This is Doug, his boat, his tackle, his bait.

Thanks for taking a newbie along.

fishing in Stuart

Doug said this was an Irish Pompano

We had caught about forty snappers and spots before this.

We were fishing the spot where the tide was running out of the two rivers that run through Stuart. Fish may be larger than it appears due to the scale of the holder.

Thanks Doug

view from This is It

This picture was created from 4 separate pictures that I took around sundown.

The spot I was standing is named This Is It. This spot is a rock outcropping from the edge of the brow on Lookout Mountain that allows a 180 degree view of the valley below.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Heading south. Grey sky no rain

Sunshine on Rough River from October 2009

new page from Google

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/

May be competing with the visual search from Microsoft.

 

Pictures from the downtown visit

From the Top of the Mark, we just visited

Looking down the street

Roof Garden above the Tonga Room

Grace Cathedral Bronze doors

Building Reflections on California Street

Pictures another way

From the Marin Highlands

From the edge of the Presidio, the old military base.

From the same point, just zoomed less.

Golden Gate Bridge 09

Well, the uploader for pictures is having an error today, so I will return in a while with a link of some kind.

Here is a link, this is a new setup, so let me know if you have problems.

Pictures to share, click here

visual allegory for travel

saw this when I went out for a walk this morning, most likely it came from the Sausalito Art Festival

Labor Day 09

We got up early so we could get some breakfast in Sausalito before the Sausalito Art Festival started.
We found this place after a bit of looking.

They had a wait to be seated line, but we found 3 seats at the counter and watched as they produced some wonderful breakfast food. In addition to the great hash browns they also made French toast by cooking a dripping chunk of bread on the grill and then deep frying it.

Then on to the Festival. Being billed as the number one Art Festival in America we thought we might be getting into something, and we did. The show was large and well juried. The artists who came from all over the US, (even Bloomington) had a wide range of medium and expression. There was an interesting ripple in the crowd due to the focus on the anniversary of Woodstock. This picture is of the main stage, where they had some headliners getting ready to appear, we did not stay that long.

The first thing we saw after we got through the gates was a gentleman named Seamus with a wonderful accent who offered us Mimosa's to get going with our day, but we had had such a good start at Fred's that we declined. The secondary stage got to rockin a little later with a swing group out of Petaluma.

The organization was flawless, partially due to the fact that this was the last day of a 4 day run, but probably mostly due to the staffers. These people were gathered in a staging area, and I thought it interesting that the staff shirts had their tasks in large letters on the back of the shirt.
By the time we left around noon, the place was so crowded it was hard to walk around, and driving out of town was the best direction to be going.

After that we headed up to Sonoma to check out the cheese and visit some wineries. Sonoma was exteremely busy so we headed up a back road to Glen Ellen and visited the Benziger winery. We left there and headed home through the Napa valley after climbing and descending the area that separates the Napa and Sonoma valleys on a very twisty two lane road.

We finished the day after discovering that Rickeysrestaurant‎ was closed at Maya Palenque.
Good friends and good food.

Bodega Bay

We went up the coast to http://www.innatthetides.com/default.aspx?pg=tideswharf&rp=map
Watched some Sail Surfers ripping the waves, saw some seals, and had a great meal. Afterwards we drove back through the scenic countryside, through Sebastopol and Petaluma.

Photo by Julie of Angel Island from the car on the sea wall in Sausalito.

We had the rental place set up for a car, but when we got there, they did not have many cars, and a lot of people waiting.  The guy standing there asked I would do a full size RV, and what we ended up with was a Suburban with 7 miles on it, for the price of the car.  We figure we justified spending the money on the gas, by saving the money on the rental.  But we'll see how it ends up when we total out. 

3 friends at the Spinnaker

Our friend Barbara treated us to an evening at the Spinnaker in Sausalito. It sits in the harbor with a view towards Angel Island and the Bay Side of SF. The food was wonderful, and made even tastier by the moonlight on the water, and the ferry boats and traffic in the bay.

a link to some great pictures

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/08/in_flight.html

My friend Fi

Having some fun in the kitchen.

Quick Visit to Downtown

I got out of my class and we headed for the Metro.
I will say that there ticket system is the most confusing thing I have tried to figure out. I'm sure it makes sense to someone, but the web, and the pamphlet we had were no help and the vending machine printing was useless. Anyway, we got a ticket and got on board.


We got on and rode for about a half hour.Which put us out at the Federal Triangle.
Thanks to Ray our friend who Julie had talked to about some tips.
If we had had more time we would have tried out the Segway tours.
The White House, somebody behind me was saying he thought they might be on the porch, but I did not see anbody.
This is very much taller in person.
Looking towards the Lincoln Memorial, past the World War II Memorial.
The President's own Marine Band.
The Capitol and the Smithsonian, we will come back when we have more time.

Otters

It is hard to see the second otter, but there are 2 otters wrestling in this picture.
We saw them from the tour boat near a glacier.

new favorite restaurant

Piper's in Anchorage is across the street from Lake Hood.
Lake Hood is the largest seaplane base in the world, and part of Ted Stevens International.
If you Google Lake Hood on the maps part, you can see the over 100 seaplanes parked around the edge of the lake.

Mt Mckinley aka Denali

This is what we saw in Denali National Park

This is a stop farther down the road from Fairbanks to Anchorage showing what Denali looks like when there are no clouds. A woman standing close to us said that she had lived here 20 years and only seen it twice.

This is what it looked like to us coming down the road from Fairbanks, before the cloud cover boiled up. The peak is over 20,000 feet up, or 4 miles, or about twice as high as I have ever had my airplane.

Arctic Circle Trip

8 hours after we left, the car above turned into the car below.

This is what the road looked like, at least on the smooth parts.

The pipeline was no always visible, but it was not far away.

The GPS with lat and lon

A roadside attraction of the pipeline.

A physical representation of the size of the pipeline, and the state with the pipeline in silver.

An idea of how big it is

An unknown girl sitting atop a cutaway of the pipeline with a cleaning pig in it.
They send this device through and retrieve at the next station to clean the walls of the pipe.

My camera had a hair on it, but this is the bridge over the Yukon River, and the pipeline.
Me at the Sign proving I was there. I had to wait in line for my turn, there were half a dozen cars there, but at least it was not the tour buses that we have run into everywhere.
All through Alaska we have seen these purple flowers, sometimes in vast fields where the woods have been burnt out. Have not yet identified them.

Denali day

We got up early to meet the train here in Fairbanks and rode it down to Denali National Park.

The weather in Fairbanks was supposed to be sunny and 78. When we got to Denali around 12, it had turned cloudy and windy. But we enjoyed out time there anyway.