Traveling

Even though I am traveling this week, I wanted to try to put up my Friday Fave Fives here at Willows Cottage.  I'll do my best to keep up the conversations, but I may be late.  This weekend is my high school reunion celebration and is of course why I have been traveling back to my hometown.

1.-2.  When Californians travel, we always note two things.  Is there snow on the mountains?  The Sierra Nevadas and the Cascades.  We were thrilled to see lots of snow on Mt. Shasta in Northern California.

There was also much more water in Shasta Lake, which means more stored water in California!

3. I love my home state of Oregon and it always thrills me when we finally arrive at the Oregon-California border.  I watch for the State of Jefferson sign on the barn and the cow and calf sculptures in the pasture, and I know we're almost there.

4.  The flora in the Pacific Northwest is so different from Southern California where we have tumbleweeds, palm trees, cactus and sage.  The PNW has rhododendrons! (I might miss these beautiful bushes like this one blooming in my brother's garden!)

5. But the best part of this trip will be seeing all our long time friends from school and church!

August is Travel Time

It's Friday--Fave Fives with Susanne at Living to Tell the Story.  Here at Willow's Cottage, it has been busy, first finishing some chores and then jumping in the car for a quick road trip.  Traveling is always a fun adventure for me.  I am blessed to be able to travel.

1.  The Professor pointed out this article to me this week.  We have always known we live in a beautiful, wonderful place.  According to Washington Post, our county is THE BEST COUNTY, the most desirable place to live in the continental US.  Note: this does NOT take in to consideration housing prices which are desirable only when you are selling.

2.  I've been traveling this week from my beautiful Ventura County through other beautiful counties in California--Santa Barbara and north, all the way to Mendocino and Humboldt Counties along Hwy 1 hugging the Pacific Ocean. Our first stop was in San Miguel to visit the old mission there.  Mission San Miguel.

3.  Then after dropping Son #2 off at Stanford University for a quick visit, we drove on north through San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge.  That bridge never fails to thrill and awe me.  I was a wee girl the first time I crossed it and cannot count the number of times since then I've made that trip.

This photo was taken about five years ago.  This week's crossing was done later in the day and in cloudy weather--not the best for photos...

4.  I have always wanted to visit Fort Ross which is the site of a Russian settlement established on the northern California coast in the early 1800s.  We had read that it was closed during the week, but we discovered when we drove in to check that this month only it was open.

5.  Then, farther north, we stopped at Point Arena Lighthouse.  Yes, we are 'those people' who love history.

We climbed to the top and even walked out on the 'catwalk'.

Bonus:  This is a long quote.  I was deeply struck with the truth of this (partial) paragraph from Elizabeth Goudge's novel Green Dolphin Street.  Humbling and convicting.

"The violence of three days ago seemed like a bad dream, and it was difficult to think of it coming alive again in this peace and beauty.  It was still harder to imagine one's self being tortured.  Torture was the sort of thing that happened to other people, to early Christian martyrs and people of that sort, but not to one's self and one's relations.  Yet why shouldn't it happen to one's self and one's own?  Out of what congenital arrogance had sprung this sense of immunity?  This "to them, not to me and mine" way of thinking, that she had hitherto taken as quite natural, was a shocking and dreadful revelation of human callousness.  Pride and selfishness, they were the same, really."

How was your week?  I'd love to hear!

Tatooine

With apologies to all my friends who live in the San Joaquin Valley of Central California.

Driving through the very arid valley along a very dull interstate highway, we stared from our car windows and decided that George Lucas must have taken his ideas for the climate and terrain of Tatooine from this area between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Road Trip! Day 1

We are traveling.  We're on a road trip.  After a rather unusual weekend in which we attended a graduation in downtown Los Angeles, we returned home and I promptly had the rest of my weekend sidetracked by an allergic reaction to 'something' (if we knew what, I'd be sure to avoid it in the future), slept most of Sunday, and muddled through Monday.

But Tuesday was a new day.  We headed east (well, we can't head west much or we'll fall off the continent into the Pacific Ocean).

Tonight we will sleep in that wonderful town of Flagstaff.  Having arrived at almost dark, I didn't have any opportunity to take photos.  Maybe in the morning...

We drove through Ventura County and Los Angeles County and then entered the US's largest county by area-San Bernardino County.  As I said, we are headed east.  This first day we detoured a bit to drive along the famous Route 66.

We have gone from 500 feet in elevation to 7,335 feet as we crossed the Arizona divide east of Williams.  We've passed avocado and citrus orchards, valleys of Joshua Tree cactus, ocotillo cactus, creosote bushes and drying tumbleweeds,  and beautiful mountains and mesas covered in pine tree forests.  Yes, all this in one day.  The change in vegetation is staggering.

Arizona!

Amboy Crater is located south of a section of Old Route 66 between Needles and Barstow.  It was created by a volcano which has been extinct for several thousand years.  The erupting volcano left flows of basalt and an incredible mound which can be reached by an easy hike.  We opted out of the hike since we had a destination to reach by evening and because the temperature was a sweltering 103F.

Tomorrow?  After breakfast with Son #1 and his lovely wife who drove up from Phoenix to meet us, on to points east!