Our Time Draws Near...

These last few days here are still wonderful and fun but the "time beast" lurks around the corner hissing that we have to go... 

Christian and his brother Oscar, who is here for the day, wash and clean out our car.  Tio mostly supervises.  I'm not sure how much "supervising" happened; he ended up holding this little angel the whole time.  She makes him smile.

The children build one last fort in the yard.

We go all out and feed Little Man and Oliver all of our leftover carrots; oh how we will miss them.

Happy Jack!

Playing wheelbarrow in the front yard.

One last dinner outside with angel food cake and strawberries for dessert.  Mr. Deke spent the day with us that day working upstairs with Jeff; he stayed around for dinner too.

Mt. Diablo State Park

One Saturday afternoon we went up to the summit of Mt. Diablo.  We can see it easily from the house.  I walk towards it every morning to the entrance of the State Park, exactly one mile from the driveway.  That particular entrance, though, is only for hikers and horses.  We left the house, turned towards town, then back again and around and went in the North Entrance which is for vehicles.  It took awhile to drive the long winding road to the summit.  While Clayton sits at 394 ft. elevation, the summit is almost 4,000 ft. 

The road we live on that "dead ends" into the state park entrance.

Along the way there are many picnic areas and hiking trails.  We stopped at one called "Rock City".

Lots of rock outcroppings to explore and climb upon.

Elizabeth found her own cave.

While it may be 80+ degrees in Clayton, on the mountain, it was much cooler; it was almost 60 degrees and windy up top.

At the top.  According to the signs and information here, the top of this mountain has been used for surverying Northern CA and Nevada.  Many survey points are taken and line are drawn from this top point. 

While we picked a clear day to go, it was cloudier at the summit.  We were able to see rivers, bridges, and towns aways off but the Golden Gate Bridge and the city were in the haze.

With the binoculars, we could easily see Mitchell Canyon Rd. (our road) that goes into the park.  Following that, we could make out the quarry, and just barely could tell where the house was.  Jeff found 3 spruce trees that are in the back in a Zen garden and I found the light color of this gravel in the driveway.

The mountain again as seen from Mitchell Canyon Road

The quarry as seen from the road.

Muir Woods

One day after Jeff got home from work rather early we visited Muir Woods National Monument. It is located not too far from the city and close to the beach as well. We had had an 85+ degree day but along the coast and also in the woods, it was much cooler. John Muir was a naturalist who spent most of his life in the woods and especially in Yosemite drawing and writing. Some day (whenever that is), I'd like to read some of his work.

There is a ring for the Civil War on this Redwood tree stump.

Giant Redwoods

A Douglas Fir. When we lived in Prairie Village, KS outside of Kansas City, we always bought Douglas Firs for our Christmas trees. I still think they are the prettiest trees for that purpose. This one might be a little large for our house, though.

Of course when they saw this, they all wanted to go in; all at once. Daddy is checking to make sure they're all inside.

Coming out.

Here's another one...

And another.....

OOps, left one in there....

This relatively small redwood began growing in 1776 at the beginning of America's fight for independence.

Yosemite National Park ~ Wednesday, June 1, 2011

On the first day of June, 2011, we trekked to Yosemite National Park. Scott who reads a lot, had for years thought that Yosemite was pronounced Yosahmight, with the 'o' being a long vowel. He didn't know it was different and as we began to talk about visiting Yosemite before coming to California, he thought that was a different park than the Yosahmight one he had read about. He has been good-natured about the teasing, so in our house, we call it Yosemite and occasionally call it Yosahmight just for fun.
It was quite a drive, about 3.5 hours. We left the house around 5:20 am with bright daylight and arrived home last night at 10:45 pm. A long day, but a fun one. Scott is taking a writing class from Beth Hempton (http://www.classesbybeth.com/) and he has been doing pretty well keeping up with his assignments using Jeff's computer. He had one due on Yosemite day and had been working on it over the weekend quite a bit. However, Tuesday, Jeff had his computer with him in Sacremento all day (he had meetings with Cal-Trans, the CA DOT) and Scott did not get finished on Tues. night. So, on the way to Yosemite he worked on his paper amidst many curvy roads. It's a good thing he doesn't get car-sick. We did not have internet connection most of the day so he couldn't send it in until last night but we were all so exhausted that the editing and sending had to be done today (Thursday).
About as soon as we got into the park, we saw this brown bear on the side of the road. We are unsure exactly what kind of bear this is though, because later, we heard that only black bears live here. Huh?? Several diffferent rangers mentioned this. We're still wondering about this.

The famous Yosemite Falls. We took a short hike to the lower falls.

Yosemite Falls from a distance.

Riding the shuttle from the parking lot to the visitor's center which was not too crowded. By lunchtime though, the park was very crowded.

Walking back down from the falls.

More pictures of the lower falls.

Jeff and I with our little bundle of joy who is all bundled. The "high" in Yosemite today was 55 degrees.

Here you can see both the upper and lower falls but cannot see the third one unless you hike pretty far up.

Jackson loved these miniature stop signs, just his size.

Grassy meadows, now protected, where cars and people used to get stuck in the bog and camp out. Behind us is Half-Dome, a large granite monolith that climbers all over the world come to for a climbing challenge.

This little gal went through 4 sets of clothes during the day; it's a good thing we came prepared. Here she is in the middle of a change.

2 hikers we saw. They are carrying empty apple juice containers on their backs. We suppose they are using them for water.

Climbers on El Capitan; the world's largest granite monolith at 3,593 feet high. You can barely see these climbers and we used the furthest zoom lense on the camera that we had. The only way we could see them well was with binoculars.

In the southern part of the park, there is a huge amount of great sequoia trees. Here is an old one that army soldiers in the late 1800s used to ride their horses on.

Amazingly, this is a pine cone and seeds off of a great sequoia tree.

This particular tree, the California Tunnel Tree, has been driven through in years past.

The seed cone of a sugar pine.

2 deer cross our path.

At the pioneer center, we saw a whole barnful of different wagons used in this area. Here is the "Sprinter" wagon, known then as a "Matha". This 11-passenger one would have had to have been our transportation if we had lived in that time.

Mosquito spraying wagon; they did this back then too, just like today.