Whew! Back from Vacation!

Just overlooking Cliff House in San Francisco is Sutro Heights Park. It used to be a huge estate, but now the only structure that remains is a promontory which tempts all climbers with its stepped wall. Like most other travelers, we totally succumbed:



Then again, we tend to climb on anything that lets us. How cool are these tree stumps? I'm a little obsessed now with setting something like this up in our back yard... Not sure where to wrangle up a bunch of chopped up tree circles though.



I love how this picture looks like we're about to go into Red Riding Hood's forest or something. How ominous is that dark space under that giant tree?





And of course we stopped by Muir Woods to see how the redwoods were getting on. Still very tall, I'm happy to report.





The most amazing this in the woods this time? A giant, slowly crawling snail that was fascinating enough to stare at for maybe forty-five minutes. It was monstrous, bigger than a dollar coin. Among those who chose not to watch it grossly crawl around? That's right, yours truly isn't really a snail person.



We were in Napa and so got to really capitalize on the one brief window of sunshine by hanging out in the back of a really pretty Italianate olive-press-cum-vinyard... wish I could remember the name. It was really a perfect little half hour.