Friends, the Golden Gate, and Waterfalls

Despite my lack of blogging this weekend about what I did this weekend, it was actually a fairly busy weekend. In fact it's because this weekend was busy that I didn't have time to blog about it! Here's a quick recap, with more to come later:

Saturday we drove up to Pacifica to meet some friends. We had lunch together, hung out for a bit, and played a boardgame.

Later Saturday afternoon we drove up through San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, to the Marin Headlands. On a scenic drive along the mountain ridge there are amazing views back across the bridge into the city. We did a bit of hiking up there, including to Hawk Hill, the highest point on the ridge, and around some of the WWII fortifications built into the hills.

Saturday night we stayed at a hotel in Mill Valley, in Marin County north of San Francisco. It was a bit of a staycation but also a bit of an "8 hours and a shower" thing to keep us closer to stuff we wanted to do and save ourselves the time driving back & forth.

Sunday we arose early-ish for hiking the "Three Cs" of waterfalls: Cataract Falls, Carson Falls, and (the other) Cascade Falls. Doing three hikes in one day felt pretty epic. It likely wouldn't be possible if we hadn't stayed over in that hotel.

Sunday night we arrived home at dusk after stopping for dinner along the way. With lunch having been protein bars on the trail, we absolutely demolished the food at the restaurant. We unloaded the car, sorted out some of our gear, started a load of laundry, and took showers. I was so beat by that point that I decided just to go to bed. I was out before 9pm.

Warm Weather... and Flowers!

I've got a backlog of things to blog about, starting from a weekend trip this past weekend to finishing up blogging about the previous weekend's trip, to other stuff that happened 7-10 days ago, to stuff I've been meaning to write about since well before then. But I'm going interrupt my regularly schedule blogging to share... flowers!



It's surprisingly warm out today. It was already 75° when I broke for lunch at 1pm, and the weather forecast says it'll get up to 77° F (25° C) by mid-afternoon. While I was outside marveling at this warm weather— though it's frankly normal for this time of April, we've had cool and rainy weather for several weeks— I spotted these flowers in bloom outside our building. Likely it's all that rain we've had, coupled with it now being warm, that's led them to bloom.

In the picture above are California Poppies, the orange flowers that are our state flower, and... uh... Bougainvilleas? Fuchsias? IDK. And, unhelpfully, doing a google image search for "purple flower with 5 petals" turns up hundreds of results that are all described as "Purple flower with 5 petals → PURCHASE NOW." 🤣

Having beautiful flowers in our garden is not really unusual. One of the reasons we bought this house years ago is because of the beautiful landscaping and gardening around it. It's just that the past few months of drear have made blooms a rare sight. Thus it's a pleasant surprise now to be reminded of the beauty around us.

In beauty I walk... even if just between the garage and front door. 😂

Phoenix Trip Retrospective

Phoenix Getaway Travelog #12
Retrospective

Whew, it's been a week since we returned from Phoenix. I only finished catching up on my blog backlog from it Friday night. I've got this one last blog to write about it, a retrospective addressing some of the dangling questions. Here are Five Things:

1) 3 days was a good amount of time. I wondered in the lead-up to the trip if we were making it too short. 3 days turned out to be a fine amount of time. Critical to that was that it's wasn't Friday late night through Sunday; instead we left home early Saturday morning and stayed through Monday. That gave us an adequate amount of time to enjoy a weekend getaway.

2) 80° was fine pool weather. Phoenix had several weeks of cool weather leading up to our trip. A week out I seriously considered canceling because the weather forecast, only warming up to 80~81° as daytime highs, seemed like it would be too cool to enjoy splashing around in the resort's pools— which was one of the primary reasons we booked the trip. I decided to stick with the trip, largely for lack of a reasonable last-minute alternative, and it turned out fine. No, the weather didn't suddenly get warmer; but the pools were heated higher than I expected so they were plenty of fun to spend hours in each day. Of course, two days after we left, Phoenix was back to highs in mid 90s.

3) Packing light worked out fine. We made a command decision Friday night while packing our bags to travel light. Instead of taking a large piece of checked luggage to carry all our usual hiking equipment, we would instead leave much of that equipment behind. We both took hiking sandals instead of big, heavy boots; and Hawk took lightweight slings for water bottles instead of her full day-pack. I still took my day-pack. These changes allowed us to skip the checked bag, taking only carry-on bags. That simplified and accelerated the airport shuffle. And we didn't miss the extra gear on the hiking trail. ...Well for this trail our hiking sandals with good treads were enough. Knowing the territory was important to this decision.

4) Cooler weather was good for hiking. I wasn't thinking so much about it when I fretted it would be too cool for the pool, but the cooler weather was awesome for the strenuous hike we did up Camelback Peak. The first time we tried it years ago, it was already over 90° at dawn when we started. We were exhausted after the first few steep stretches. Doing the first part of the ascent in 70° weather made the whole thing more feasible. We got to the summit!

5) Aches and pains. I wrenched my shoulder on the hike coming down one of the steep parts near the end. I worried at the time, on Sunday afternoon, that injury would be with me for a while. Good news: my shoulder ache pretty much disappeared by Tuesday morning with the help of topical anesthetic. Bad news: aches in my legs stuck around longer. By Monday evening I could tell I had way overdone it with my quadriceps. It hurt walking down stairs or down ramps. On Tuesday I was weeble-wobbling around the house. My quads felt like rubber. Unhappy rubber. I was wobbly and in pain through Wednesday. By Thursday both the pain and wobbliness reduced but didn't disappear. Thankfully by Saturday morning I was back to about 90%, just in time for another weekend of hiking!