Wine Country

Road Trip, day 5: Santa Rosa and driving through wine country.
After a pleasant breakfast with the Mohler's we headed up to visit my Grandmother in Santa Rosa, about 2 hours north of San Jose. It's a beautiful area and it's so good to see my Grandmother enjoying her new home up north. After a few hours visit, we drove through wine country (Sonoma and Napa County) to Nevada City, where we spent the remainder of our trip. Here are some pictures along the way, which turned out pretty good considering they were taken from the window of the car:

Rita, the backseat driver, always watching out for us:

Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

Road trip, day 4: Golden Gate Park, boating in Stow Lake and riding the 6-person bike.
This day was a lot of fun. Jenni, Jonny, and Jonny's friend David came along. We went on a peaceful, beautiful boat ride around Stow Lake, and then went a little crazy on the 6-person bike. At one point, the sissies got off and let the boys ride the bike down the hill several times. It's always fun til someone gets hurt... which was Sam, the rebel of the afternoon. As we were nearing a corner, everyone in the cart realized we were going to hit this pole so we all flipped out a bit and yelled at Sam to "slow down!" As he makes the tight turn, he says "That's not necessary." And as he finishes the word, runs the driver's side of the bike straight into the pole, smashing his foot and the bike pedal. I'm actually surprised he didn't break his foot as he was hobbling around for a good long day, but at least it all made for some good fun and humor.

Glow

We went to an art installation on the Santa Monica beach at night called Glow. It was super crowded and really fun to walk on the beach at night. However, the art pieces that we saw were terrible. We missed the ones farther down on the beach, which we heard from a friend were better pieces, but it was too bad that the 1/3 of the installations that we saw weren't that good. Oh well, still fun...

Here's a couple pictures of the pier at night:

Band Of Horses, again...

A few photos from the show...

Friday's Photo of the Week #34

This was a photo I took on the night of the largest harvest moon this week. Definitely much more beautiful in person, but still turned out to be an ok picture...

Band of Horses

I saw Band of Horses last night at Jimmy Kimmel Live. There's a shot at 2:09 where you can see the friends I went with (in the background of the shot), Courtney Brillhart and Jessica Abroms. :) We waited for about 3 hours to get a few rows from the front and listened to 5 wondrous songs. I'm so glad I get to see them at the Greek on Saturday! I've been waiting all summer!



Also, they played live this morning on KCRW. You can listen to the full show here:
http://www.kcrw.com/music/programs/mb/mb100922band_of_horses

BUT first check out this video. It's such a beautiful version of their song: No One's Gonna Love You. I think this is my favorite Band Of Horses song ever. It means a lot to me:

And a cell phone pic from last night:

California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco

Road trip, day 3: San Francisco's Golden Gate Park: CA Academy of Sciences
Jenni, Sam and I enjoyed the CA Academy of Sciences, then Sam and I had dinner and dessert with the Mohlers in San Jose. It was a wonderful day. Here are some pictures from the museum:

The Rainforest Globe

This aquarium was on the 2nd-to-last floor and you could look up to the living roof top.

Believe it or not, this photo is unedited. Ah, jellyfish. How beautiful you are:

Purple or yellow. You decide.

The rooftop is a "living roof" where they grow all sorts of plants for experiments:

Friday's Photo of the Week #33

This was a cell phone snapshot that I took out the sunroof while driving on the 110 last Saturday night. It is mostly luck that I got the photo of the Marriott building in the fog with such great composition. I'm proud of what a little traffic and a quick glance up can do. :)
Most evenings I drive home marveling at what a beautiful city I live in. I love Los Angeles.

Got 2 free pairs of tickets yesterday. Two tickets to the LA Dodger game vs. the Colorado Rockies tomorrow. And two tickets to see Band of Horses at Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday.
Rock on!
Hope you all have a delightful weekend.

Yosemite panoramas

A few more Yosemite photos...because it's worthy of another post. :) Here's some panoramas I recently put together:

I love the prism effect it was creating on the rocks below.

The waterfall in it's full glory!

Yosemite National Park

Road Trip, day 1-2: Fresno, CA and Yosemite National Park
We met up with Jenni and Jonny (my sister and brother) and stayed the night in Fresno at my cousin's house. It's always nice to see them. We ate dinner and played word games... family feud, password and taboo. It was a blast.
Yosemite was crowded and we had to park 2 miles away from the trail head. Because we had the dogs with us, we couldn't take the shuttle either. So we had to cut our hike a little short, but it was still an amazing 8 miles. Yosemite is one of my favorite places on earth. When you drive around the bend that reveals half dome and el capitan, my heart just soars. I was giddy with excitement... yes, giddy like a little school girl. We ended the day in San Jose, where we stayed with our friends Courtney and George, who just moved there. It was delightful. Here are some of my favorite photos from these two days.

The tall trees make me feel so small... in a good way.

Mountain Adventurers:

Me, Sam and the dogs near the base of the waterfall:

Jonny flexing his muscles, as usual. ;)

My sister Jenni, admiring the mist.