Walking around the city yesterday, I saw lingering signs of summer on the High Line,
but today in Battery Park City it was looking more like fall.
So far, no Pale Male sightings.
Category Archives: Travels
Lunch hour in Redwood Park
With such a short stay in San Francisco this week I don’t have time to visit the coast redwoods in their native habitat in Muir Woods. The next best thing is this peaceful park in the heart of the Financial District.
Out on Montgomery everyone is in a hurry, hustling down the street with a carryout lunch to take back to the office. Cab drivers vie for position with motorcycles and pedestrians, honking when someone doesn’t move fast enough.
Inside the park a fountain muffles the street noise and tourists sit on benches, pens poised over postcards.
The grove of redwoods tower overhead. How tall are they? I try to gauge based on the buildings behind them, but I’m not sure–my best guess is 150 plus feet. They are the tallest trees on earth and can reach 300 feet.
I could stay here all day, but will venture back out to the street to catch a bus.
Side Trip to Scottsdale
When Dave told me that we needed to stop to look at a project in Scottsdale on our way home from San Francisco, I pictured a faux Italian shopping center in the heart of the city, all asphalt and manicured gardens. I set the map program on my cell phone to the address and was pleasantly surprised when we kept driving, all the way to the northern border of Scottsdale. Right next door is the small town of Carefree, surrounded by the Sonoran Desert.
It was overcast when we arrived, keeping the temperature below ninety, so I was able to comfortably go for a walk. Black Mountain and this pile of boulders provided the backdrop to the desert landscape filled with saguaro, cholla, and ocotillo. A family of Gambel’s quail scattered when I tried to get a closer look at a prickly pear cactus loaded with red fruit.
The clouds burned off and the temperature started to rise, so I took refuge under a green-trunked Palo Verde tree. Just like it does for the baby saguaros, it sheltered me from the desert sun.
The Sea Lions of San Francisco
Corn dogs. Cotton candy. Caricature artists. It’s all at Pier 39–San Francisco’s nonstop carnival for the last 35 years.
Photo Credit: Benson Kua via Compfight cc
It was tempting, but I kept walking past the churro stand and carousel to the railing at the back of the pier. Sunlight glinted on the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge was visible in the distance, but I didn’t linger. What I wanted to see was around the corner and I could already hear the barking and yelping.
- Photo Credit: towneplaceturningpoint.com
I had to wait a few minutes for a spot to open up next to the railing, almost every person with a camera pointed toward the California sea lions (Zalophus californianus). About twenty feet away was a wooden float with fifteen or so of the huge marine mammals napping, flipper to flipper.
They haven’t always been at Pier 39, but began to show up a few months after the October 1989 Loma Prieto earthquake that crumpled a portion of the Bay Bridge and disrupted a World Series game at Candlestick Park. That was more than twenty-three years ago and no one knows for sure if the two events were related.
K-Dock was originally a boat dock when the pinnipeds took up residence, but over time the boats were relocated and the sea lions were allowed to stay. With a ready source of herring and other food available in the bay and none of their predators, great white sharks and Orcas, present it has become a favorite spot for the males to hang out. The females tend to stay near their breeding grounds in the Channel Islands.
While I stood at the rail juggling my camera and recorder trying not to drop either in the water, a constant stream of visitors flowed around me. A breeze kept the strong fishy smell at bay.
Two youngsters, judging by their size, hauled up into the group of sleeping adults, ignoring several empty floats just a few feet away. They shook themselves dry, shoving and biting each other. The napping sea lions barked in protest, rolled over, and soon the two juveniles were back in the water, chasing each other around the bay.
Pier 39 provides a twenty-four hour sea lion webcam and if you scroll to the bottom of this article on the Marine Mammal Center’s website you can also get a sense of what it sounds like out on the west side of the pier. The only thing missing is the smell!
Weekend in the Desert
Photo Credit: Riviera by James Marvin Phelps
I first visited Nevada on a family vacation when I was a kid. After spending a July night in the Mojave Desert camping out at Lake Mead, we were all ready to check-in at a motel with a swimming pool on the Las Vegas Strip next door to the Riviera. We were wowed by the lights and Englebert Humperdinck’s name on the marquee next door..
Last weekend my husband, Dave, and I visited Las Vegas to see family and to take in a show. The temperature hovered at about 100 degrees, dipping below 80 degrees at night, amazingly pleasant. Last month National Public Radio (NPR) did a story about people who visit nearby Death Valley in the middle of the summer to feel some of the hottest temperatures in the world. I wasn’t up for that, but did want to experience the Mojave in some small way.
As we climbed the steep driveway to my in-laws’ house in Boulder City, I noticed bushes with little “cotton balls” on them. My mother-in-law, Mary, told me they were creosotes bushes that bloom yellow in the spring. I have been visiting her at this house for more than twenty years and had never noticed them. I went back outside and broke off a piece of one to take a closer look.
Creosote bushes (Larrea tridentata) are the most common perennial in this part of Nevada. Real drought survivors, these along the driveway thrive on six-inches or less of rainfall a year. My little sample is all dried out after a week in a plastic bag, but it still has the distinctive smell of camphor that is especially noticeable when it is wet–in the the desert they call it “the smell of rain”.