Trip 9 - California Dreamin'

On this trip we set out to immerse ourselves in the culture and the nature of California. To discover its textures and see some of its natural wonders. We discover that California is very big. It is not a state that you can just pass through, it is, more than any other place we have visited, more like another country. It is a land dominated by mountains, the spaces between and like nowhere else, water.
Our start in the heavily populated area to the East of Los Angeles, known as the Inland Empire, is crowded into the lowlands surrounded by magnificent mountains. The feeling is of a cauldron which is trying to boil over the mountains to the fresh air of the rest of the state.
To the South is a band of Desert, which is the buffer to Mexico, which we did not explore on this trip.
We travelled North through the mountains (everywhere in California you can see mountains) to the desert, and on again to the huge Central Valley, mile after mile of intensive agriculture. Culture here is dominated by food, flatness, low income and trying to impact on the 'sameness' of the flat lands through music and festival. It is the communication and administrative corridor that links all other areas of California.
To the East is the huge mountain chain of the Sierra Nevada which clearly demonstrates the magnificence of the natural world, both in its geology and nature, reflected in the pysche and pride of most Californians. It is Eldorado, dominated by Gold!
To the West of the Central Valley are the coastal mountains, San Francisco and the magnificent coast. More isolated cultures, from mixed resources, communities seperated by mountains.
To the North of the Central Valley more mountains and a culture which looks more North towards Oregon than South to Sacremento.
This blog details our journey through California, where we pick and choose, or just scratch the surface, of this diverse and beautiful state.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

The Golden Gate Park

Today is to be our last visit to SFbefore we move on to Monteray. We drove straight through the main part of the city and took Fell St towards the Golden Gate Park but made a short detour along Ashbury to Haight St, to see (but to us quite normal) Haight-Ashbury, made famous by strange myths from the Flower Power Days of the the sixties. Now it is just a row of eclectic (which I now know means either expensive or touristy) shops.
We entered the park and drove through for quite some time before finding the Japanese Tea Garden (JTG), which we had come specifically for, or somewhere to park as there were so many people there. It is a very large park, we passed a number of formal gardens, the Rose Garden, the big amphitheatre and the De Young Art Gallery, where we stopped for a morning drink, before getting to the JTG. The gardens themselves were beautiful with lots of twisty little paths, hills, valleys and ponds which gave lots of different views in a very small space. We laughed a lot when a man taking a photo stepped backwards off the small bridge and fell straight into the water. He must have got so cold as it was quite a chilly day. We wandered through for an hour or so then stopped for a cup of Japanese tea and a Japanese snack, very interesting.
After our visit to the JTG we had a picnic in the park then drove on down to the coast and to Lands End for another lovely view of The Golden Gate Bridge, before coming home through some abysmal traffic, via 2628 Steiner St, the home of Mrs Doubtfires family.

Posted by fastrak at 7:55 AM

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