I have heard the story of San Francisco’s great earthquake and fire in 1906 countless times, but walking around certain parts of the city can still bring the history back to life in unexpected ways. Visiting the California Academy of Sciences in 2016, I entered the earthquake simulator and experienced first the shaking of the Loma Prieta quake in 1989 […]
There are a number of different Chinatowns in California these days. The one in San Francisco is probably the best known, as it’s fairly large and still thriving, very popular with tourists. In contrast, San Luis Obisbo’s Chinatown has very nearly disappeared, with only one original building remaining — Ah Louis store, first built in 1874. One of the main […]
Whenever I’m able to spend a few days in San Francisco, as a rule I try to avoid doing the most obvious tourist stuff. Of course, this rule must occasionally be broken — like when I visited Alcatraz for the first time back in 2018. And this year I feel like I broke the rule again when I ventured to […]
Well, yes, it’s been awhile. Just shy of a month — a month of some serious ups and downs for me. First there was a trip over to the Mendocino coast; then I came down with Covid for the first time ever; and once I had more or less recovered from that, I spent a week in San Francisco. But […]
Our recent 5-day trip over to the Mendocino County coast didn’t exactly go according to plan. We had a series of things go wrong: heavy traffic both going and coming back, road construction all up and down Highway 1, gusty winds, and a bent rim on our rental car. But the trip wasn’t all bad. We took a drive north […]
We went looking for potential new fishing spots north of Fort Bragg, hoping to reach the town of Westport and maybe a bit beyond. Leaving behind gusty north winds in Point Arena, the Big Guy had only a vague idea of what he was looking for, but we were enjoying the process of exploration. Just a little south of Bruhel […]
Clovis is a classic small California town, founded back in 1891 and now growing beyond anything Mr. Clovis Cole could have imagined. I’ve never spent much time in this part of the state, but if you’ve ever traveled to the southern Sierra near Huntington or Shaver lakes you would have passed right through Clovis — just east of Fresno — […]
A lot of times I’ll shoot somewhat random photos that don’t really seem to fit anywhere; or, like some of these today, they happened at the beginning or tail end of a road trip and for that reason I somehow forget about them. Some of my most fun images were those I shot on impulse. So I decided to gather […]
Today I wanted to show some of the flowers we saw on our Texas roadtrip that were not wildflowers; I found them at hotels where we stayed and a few other spots. With so many beautiful wildflowers to be seen, I still noticed a few cultivated blooms, like the Hibiscus flowers in the yard next door to where we were […]