Happy New Year!

Hello to everyone!  I'm baaaack!

I hope your holidays were filled with family, friends, and good times.

I really enjoyed the time I spent with my family this last month and a half.  It has been many years since Lee and I have been able to visit family on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I am abundantly grateful.

We now plan to stay in Petaluma, northern California, until Sunday, January 8.  Lee feels it will be easier to drive through the Bay Area on a Sunday, as the traffic will be lighter, and I think he is probably right.  We will drive south on the East Bay freeway, through San Jose, and then on to Monterey as our next stop.

Lee and I had some time for sight-seeing during December, revisiting some of our favorite places.  The second day here we drove to Sausalito, north of San Francisco but south of Petaluma.  The view below is of Tiburon, across from Sausalito's harbor.  Tiburon is  partially lit by the sun.  

A day or two later we visited San Francisco, starting with the Presidio.  We wanted to see the new (new to us) George Lucas buildings, where the digital portions of his films are created.  Regulations require that new buildings fit in with the existing architecture, and in this case it was done quite successfully.

Who knew there was a fountain featuring a statue of Yoda??  What a special treat!

There was also a statue of Eadweard Muybridge, a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences (if I remember correctly), and a photographer who, through his ingenuity, was the first to photograph a galloping horse with all four hooves off the ground at once, thus solving an age-old mystery.   The Academy owns a copy of his ground-breaking work, which includes the walking, trotting, and galloping of dozens of animals, including some from the Philadelphia Zoo.  Did you ever wonder how a camel walks or runs?  Check out Muybridge!  (And yes, that is Lee in the background, admiring the Palace of Fine Arts.)

I love seeing the Golden Gate Bridge emerging from the clouds:

We even saw Alcatraz Island partially hidden by the fog:

You never know what the view is going to be when you are on the bay!  Landmarks come and go with the fog.

The Golden Gate Bridge is my favorite bridge - it is so beautiful.  When I attended UC Berkeley way back when, I lived on the 8th floor of the dorm where my view was of the bay, the Oakland Bay Bridge and Treasure Island, and the Golden Gate Bridge.  As you might imagine, it was difficult to focus on homework.

What else did we do?  We drove to Mendicino one day, a small town on the coast.  It has several cute shops and some lovely views of the Pacific Ocean:

We saw yet another beautiful sunset, one of many, at Bodega Bay, then ate seafood at a restaurant on the harbor.  I never get tired of visiting the California coast.  It is sparsely populated, because the narrow roads one has to take to reach it wind in and out of hillsides and ravines.  It is not particularly fun for those of us who get motion sickness, but worth the effort in the end.

Look for a second installment of this week's blog in the next day or two.

It's nice to be back!  I have missed hearing from people!