Travel Gallery
California 2021
Galleries on this Page
2021 Orange County
We traveled to California after our stay in Texas. We went up and down the coast from Orange County to San Diego to Los Angeles to San Francisco and finally north to Mendocino and Sonoma County. We stayed mostly with friends and family along the way.
In Orange County we stayed with our good friend who originally was a friend of my mother. They were neighbors and both taught at the university of Kansas. She is now in Laguna Nigel near Laguna Beach and San Clemente, living on top of a hill overlooking a deep valley from her backyard and amazing sunrises to the east.
We went whale watching from Dana Point and saw no whales, but lots of dolphins. had lunch on the pier in San Clemente and visited other beaches filled with surfers. As you can see from the images, there was a lot of fog. Having lived in San Francisco for seven years, fog should not have surprised me, but it did. I didn’t think the rest of the state, especially so far south, would would be foggy, but I was told that June is the month for fog. And that was true. We had many foggy days during our stay.
But the good news was that we did not experience any of the hear waves that hit the state when we were there. Most days were wore sweaters and jackets.
Here is the first gallery of images from our stay with her. Still to come, images from San Diego and points north. Next is San Diego and that area.
2021 San Diego
Rental cars were scarce according to the news when we tried to rent a car to go to San Diego from Orange County. But Budget had a car that we could pick up in a small shopping center near by. The man who ran the one person office said, “Charger or Mustang?” They were the only cars he had available at any price. So we took the Mustang and head south to San Diego. We stayed two days in the Little Italy neighborhood. We guessed that it would be an okay place and we lucked out. We could see the bay from our window, there was a lively street scene with restaurants with out door dinning, and a great walk through the harbor and gas light district. In the car we visited interesting neighborhoods.
Orange County and San Diego are separated by Camp Pendleton which takes up a huge hunk of the coast. From San Clemente to Ocean Side there is a real disconnect. From Ocean Side to La Jolla the beach towns get more prosperous as you near San Diego. The exception is Ocean Beach, a much more working class area, opposite a bay separating it from La Jolla.
2001 Los Angeles
We took a train to Los Angeles and spent a few days with Rosy’s cousin and his wife. They took us around the city and up to the Ojai Valley and Montecito, north of the city.
They have art and objects collected from years of going to flea markets and I could not resist taking a few pictures of them.
We also drove down the coast along Malibu and saw the waves crashing even on a calm day.
San Francisco 2021
We tried to fly stand-by to San Francisco from L.A., but all the flights were full. Rather that spend the day at the airport trying to get a flight that we might not make, we took a bus. The bus picked us near Hollywood and Vine and dropped us off near the train station in San Francisco eight hours later.
We stayed with our friend Richard, a gardener, poet, novelist, mediocre accordionist and my oldest friend from Kansas. He lives in a house in Bernal Heights that was built to shelter victims of the ’07 earthquake—two families to the house. He shares his garden with the local raccoons, squirrels and what ever else shows up.
After Richard, we stayed with our friends Amy and Jim in Richmond. We came to the city one day to see the art museum where we saw a mural by Diego Rivera that is being restored there before it goes back to my sort of alma mater, Community College of San Francisco where I studied commercial photography in the 1970’s after graduate school in English at Indiana University.
Sonoma and mendocino Counties
The last stop was northern California where Rosy’s sister is remodeling a house in Healdsburg, north of Santa Rosa. While the house is under construction and she has been staying with her son and family who live over the mountain in Boonville, which is on the road to Mendocino.
People have asked if we experienced any of the fires or the heat waves while we were in California. We were very lucky—we had no smoke or fires nearby, temperatures were mostly mild, even cool. On the hottest day it got to 99°, but at night it was 55°. We drove to the coast twice but we didn’t stop in the redwood forest that was on the way. I wanted to be there in the evening on our last day to photograph, but we ran into car trouble on the coast and we didn’t drive through in day light.
We are back in New York and the uptick in Covid means that we will be staying around for a while. But look for more images and galleries from my travels in the exotic Central Park.
