Halloween field tripping

Homeschoolers can do field trips, too. This is an annual one for our group—a trip to what used to be a small, local pumpkin patch and apple orchard with a very scary haunted house but is now a very large fall fair. Putt putt golf, petting zoo, haunted hayride, corn maze, paint ball, AND pumpkins and apples in the fields. We get a doughnut and cider snack, too, of course.

And we didn't get lost in the corn maze.

Birthday

Someone in the house is getting older, and I'm not telling who, but it's someone who's name does not start with C.

We celebrated by trying out the Nul Tasting Room, kin to our favorite downtown restaurant: Jolly Pumpkin. It's beer, of course, and Nul is the tasting room for three great Michigan craft breweries. They also happen to be within walking distance from our house. Not that we walked on this occasion, mind you. It is chilly out there, after all.

We loved it, by the way.

Cali part 6 (the final hurrah): Gilroy

On our way back to the airport in San Francisco we enjoyed more views of the central valley, and one last hurrah in the tiny town of Gilroy—the garlic capital of the world. Roasted garlic, garlic fries, and garlic burgers oh my.

Cali part 5: Sequoia and Kings Canyon

Yosemite was definitely beautiful, but I think for me Kings Canyon surpassed it. Less traveled and certainly more rural, the drive into Kings Canyon is stunning and precarious. It's also a road to nowhere, literally to "Trail's End", and which point all travelers must turn around and head back over the same treacherous thirteen miles they drove on their way in; Thirteen mile that took over an hour to traverse the first time and will certainly take equally long on the way back, if not more so since now the trip is mostly on the outer lane, the one that seems to be only inches from a catastrophic drop.

It's an amazing and completely worthwhile trip.

On this final day for the parks we saw General Grant and General Sherman (the two biggest trees ever), we drove into and out of the stunning Kings Canyon, and straight through Sequoia in a setting fall sun.

We also saw a bear. A real, honest-to-goodness, big black bear.

He was beautiful.

The trees...they're big.

Kings Canyon: the pictures don't do it justice.

That's our road way down there...

...and way down there, too...

...and that's our road again, hanging precariously off the side of that mountain...

Sequoias are surprisingly spongy on the outside

I have no photographic evidence, but imagine a bear here...

Cali part 4: Yosemite

On Tuesday we hopped in the rental van and headed over the Coastals, through the valley, and into the Sierra Nevadas.

Our drive through the central valley was a serious eye opener. When you stop watering a field here it simply goes feral. Stop watering an orchard there and it goes bone dry dead. We saw both live and dead orchards on our drive, and a dammed lake at all-time low levels. I'd seen pictures of California's disappearing lakes and exposed bridges, but seeing it in person was far more heartbreaking.

Like San Francisco, Yosemite has long been on my bucket list. We arrived in the evening on the first day (after taking a side trip to a lunch spot that the Garmin was adamantly sure was located in thin air on the drop-off side of the winding mountain road), and enjoyed the stunning view from Glacier Point. Our one full day in the park we spent driving the valley floor and taking a couple of short hikes (walk really) to what were, of course, dry waterfalls.

We saw the many faces of Half Dome. We enjoyd drinks at the Ahwahnee and a picnic lunch in a valley floor meadow. With the waterfalls so low we climbed across boulders and into the stream beds. We may not have had time to hike, but the sights were certainly pleasing.

No bears, though.