Labor Day Trip to San Jose and Northern California

It took me a while to get this blog posted because I was way too impatient with how long it took to upload all of these images in the order I wanted; thus, I would add a few at a time every few days or so, and now I finally finished adding them tonight. 

 So, now you have a picture timeline of my trip, which was fantastic, thanks to Tierney and Jared who really made it worthwhile with their generous offering of their home, time, food, and chauffering skills.  People like people with skills.

Friday: Santa Cruz!  While there was a heat wave sweltering over San Jose, Santa Cruz was carefully blanketed in fog, and thus we sported the sweatshirt look.  We enjoyed garlic fries, the Big Dipper Roller Coaster (which I absolutely was not scared of as you can see on my face), and ended up leaving early from a disappointing concert--a little too liberal and on-the-end-of-th-limb-and-about-to-break-it type of stuff.  Gotta love California.

Jared makes me look like even more of a wuss.

Lights, crowds, and fog . . . typical California beach line.

Fantastic tour guide Tierney, and excellent chauffer Jared.

Saturday: The Oakland Temple, San Francisco, and the John Muir Redwoods!  A little bit of everything was fit into this day--even expensive metered parking (even I didn't bring enough quarters to cover an hour)--as we began with the Oakland Temple (wanted to start the day right!), hit Ghiradelli Square, China Town, and a windy ride down Lombard street in downtown San Fran, drove over the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate en route to San Fran and the John Muir Redwoods, and finished up the day in the quiet and solitude beauty of the redwood trees.

Alcatraz . . . never leave California without a picture of this beauty.

Ghirardelli would bring a smile to any chocolate lover's face. 

A quick picture peek at China town . . . of course I got a picture of tourists instead of Chinese, just my luck.

Wow.  Beautiful!

Bridges are cool, but no need to take choreographed pictures of them.  Rearview mirrors and dashboards frame them quite nicely for me.

Did you know I love nature?  Little known fact . . .

Monday: Monterrey Bay and Carmel!  Monterrey Bay has the coolest aquarium I've ever been to--you could seriously spend all day there.  While the jellyfish exhibit is amazing and affords some pretty sweet pictures, I wish I could have gotten a picture of the all to0 rambunctious sea otters, and seen some shows of trained animals--who wants to see them act natural when you can train them to be otherwise?  But you can't expect to enjoy all those things when you show up on a holiday.  And while the Carmel coastline is all brown in these photos, driving out there we drove through thick wooded forests of all sorts of trees, even my favorite, the fragrant eucalyptus.

In the background is a shark . . . this odd looking specimen, called the sun fish, is keeping itself at a safe distance.  At least he's no dummy.

Shafts of light, fish, and vegetation.  Need I say more?  It's just beautiful.

Jared is hoping to get into yachting (i.e., the upper tier of the business world all owns yachts to enjoy keeping them in a bay, and maybe taking them out once a year).  I told him he could always invite me along.

Old meets new.

He really didn't want to sit still, so I went for the action shot.

Tuesday: Yep, while the rest of the working world went back to work, I went to the beach, going to Rio Del Mar, just a little bit south of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.  As you can see, I had it all to myself, and enjoyed the waves, sand, sun, and time to myself to relax after a whirlwind weekend--I was quite rejuvenated before coming home on Wednesday.

The end.