Allison in California

Click on a photo to see it enlarged.

Allison is my niece. She flew here from Virginia to see me and to get a California tan. The photography club had a shoot-out scheduled for Natural Bridges State Beach on Saturday, so that's where we headed. We arrived several hours early to spend some quality time on the beach, but as often happens at Northern California beaches, the sun never shown. We hiked around for a bit, shot a few photos, had lunch on the beach, and then settled down to bask in the fog.

Saturday evening we visited a hokey little
parking lot carnival in Morgan Hill.On Monday, we sojourned to San Francisco. Our first stop was the Academy of Sciences, which has a rain forest, aquarium, planetarium, and natural history museum. (I did not enjoy seeing the stuffed African animals.)

The rain forest was way cool (in a hot & humid sort of way), with butterflies flitting around, HUGE spiders spinning webs, geckos, chameleons, frogs, snakes and exotic birds.Leaving the rain forest, we dropped into an undersea world of coral, fish, albino alligators, turtles, sea horses, and jellies.

Our next stop, after leaving the academy around noon, was the Golden Gate Bridge. I missed the turn into the visitor center, so we continued over the bridge and up the turn-off to the Marin headlands.

For this shot, I set the camera on the hood of my car
with the lens propped up on my sunglasses.

We left the bridge and headed east on Lombard Street
(the crookedest street in the world) toward downtown.

We circled Coit Tower and then, after several wrong turns (even with the navigation system), we made our way to Haight/Ashbury, the very center of the Psychedelic 60s, Flower Power, and LSD. Now you sort of feel like you're in Hippyland at Disney World, but the shopping and people watching were good entertainment.We also went out to lunch in MH, ate dinner in San Juan Bautista, and worked out at the rec center. Allison spent enough time in my backyard that when she left this morning, she had a first-rate California tan.