More pictures!

Here are some more pictures from my California trip!

First, here's a picture of me and my friend SanFranciscoDave. He generously let us stay with him while we were visiting San Francisco and showed us around his part of town. This is a picture of us on the way up to Twin Peaks to get a look at the city. Unfortunately, by the time we hiked up there, fog had rolled in and we couldn't see anything! But at least the sun was shining when we first started out. I think the flowers all around are pretty!




And here is a picture from King's Canyon National Park. We drove there from Yosemite and poked around for an afternoon.

While we were in the area, we also checked out Sequoia National Park, which more or less merges with King's Canyon. The sequoia trees there are ENORMOUS! It's amazing to think that they grow from teeny tiny little pine cones that are even smaller than regular-size pine cones. And they are supposed to be thousands of years old. In a word, they are impressive. Look carefully at this picture and you can see all the tiny little people standing around at the base of this tree, which I think is supposed to be the largest tree on earth:

After driving through Sequoia and King's Canyon, we headed down to Death Valley. That's right--we hit FOUR national parks during our one-week fly-by of California. Below is a picture of me on the way to a scenic point in Death Valley called "Golden Canyon." Basically, we got out of the car, walked about 500 yards or so, saw a sign that said, "Golden Canyon: 1.1 miles" or something like that, took this picture, and walked back to the car. We were not about to walk over 2 miles round-trip to see this Golden Canyon, no matter how wonderful it was--it was just too darn hot outside to go trekking around like that. The car's thermometer said it was 127 degrees when we were driving through. Let me tell you, that's HOT.

And here is another picture that GPG took of Death Valley, which I think does a good job of capturing just how desolate that place is:

Of course, GPG took all of the pictures you've seen on this site. He is, after all, the one with the digital camera. I took a bunch of regular film pictures and got Sam's Warehouse to put them on CDs for me, but transferring them to this site from the CDs was a bigger pain than I was willing to deal with. So GPG has been very nice in letting me use his pictures. Thanks, GPG!