Howling Frog Books

 I haven't been able to do much reading (my poor neglected summerbooks!), because I've been having adventures all over the place.... My good friend Melanie wanted to do a hot-air balloon trip for her birthday, and her husband was like 'no way' so I said I'd do it and she asked all her friends.  We got a total of just three -- Melanie, her friend Bryn (who lives near Seattle) and me.    We set out from Chico with many snacks, and dilly-dallied our way down to Tahoe.  There was no hurry, so we stopped a few times.  We went to Donner Pass and walked through the disused railroad tunnels above Donner Lake.  That was super fun, and I highly recommend it.   There are four tunnels along the hillside, with space between them.  Parts are blasted rock and other parts have been smoothed out with concrete, and a whole lot of the space is covered in graffiti.  There's still snow melting in June, so it was pretty drippy, and the four...

 Well, after that very wet and cold winter, spring has sprung with great enthusiasm!  So here are a few photos, which (being my amateur efforts on my phone) don't come anywhere near doing justice to the reality.  Somehow a field of flowers looks more like a field of rocks in a photo...these are Table Mountain and Upper Bidwell Park.

 But we were not done with our spring break, no way! We also wanted to do a little hiking closer to home, so the next day we drove up to a local wildflower spot, Table Mountain.  It really is pretty flat for the top of a mountain and makes for nice, easy hiking (except the rocky deposits all over the place, which are sharp and hard on the ankles). However, it's been such a long, cold, and wet spring that the flowers had barely had a chance to get started.  Normally in the third week of March you'd expect to see many types of flowers, with drifts of blue lupins among the yellow goldfields, but when we were there, only the tough goldfields were out, with a few other companions. We had a good time hiking down to our usual destination at the top of Hollow Falls.  We got to see a couple of newts doing their thing.  Mostly we just enjoyed the outdoors! << The waterfall is invisible, over to the left It's a newt!

 This was really our last day in our Oakland house, and we had to be out by 10, which we managed with three minutes to spare, leaving everything nice behind us.  There were several things I wanted to do right in the area, and first we headed to the African-American History Museum and Library, which is a branch of the Oakland Public Library housed in a lovely old building.  Everybody looked at historical photos and such.  They've got a seed library too, so my mom was happy to get some seeds. Then it was off to Alameda, which was really just a few blocks away; you take a tunnel under the water.  Alameda was not originally an island, but the mud flats surrounding it were not very useful, so they dredged a channel and built the island out with landfill, which rendered the whole area perfect for shipping and naval-base building.  The base closed in 1997, so I remember when it was open and active.  Anyway, there's a specialty needlework shop in Alameda and I...