SFO- day trip - Presidio - Lover's lane trail

We had a great time today at SFO. Went with friends to a lot of different places.. First stop was Presidio park. The highlight was Lover's lane..

This photo of a photo in the making was captured by my neighbor and friend. Think she is starting a trend of taking pictures of folks taking pictures during the hikes. I for one, like it! There are not that many candid shots of me in the last few years as I am the one taking pictures all the time. 

Left early from Cupertino, parked next to Inspiration point and caught a view of Alcatraz and everything in that general direction!

From there we walked on the Lover's Lane trail down to Lyon street. Stopped to take pictures on the way. It was such a beautiful and pleasant day and the colors were just vibrant everywhere. The wildflowers were in bloom on every slope giving everything a yellow and orange hue!

that picture made my day! 

This place was just amazing.. eucalytpus trees on both sides and a zig zag trail. The smells, the shadows, everything was perfect!

The trail ends at a gate.. then you have to cross the street and go down some manicured shrub lined steps that end up in a heart at the base. If it was not for alltrails, we would have definitely missed a lot of the stuff! 

I had some fun posing in a relief wall..

This was followed by a walk on the lake trail to see the lake. We were late for lunch, so we did not spend much time there. Just took pictures and rushed back to the parking lot.

Had an amazing lunch at the vegan place on Mission street called Gracias Madre (this is our second trip there, our first was last Valentines day just a month before everything shut down!). How things have changed in a year?! 

From there we went to see more sights.. topic for tomorrows blog.. 

Time to edit some photos..

A Pongal that came and went..

Pongal was celebrated in our house three weeks ago! It just so happens that I still did not have a laptop and before we could say "pongaloo pongal" , Jr. was back to college.

So was her laptop which I was temporarily borrowing for blog posts. I am tepidly happy to say that my new Macbook Pro has arrived. Tepidly happy because it took more than a month to show up instead of the two weeks (Chip delays apparently.. which is a good thing for people in the Semiconductor business like me as prices are going up!) and the new Apple M1 chip has a lot of "compatibility issues" with things like Photoshop.. 

Had to go shop for a new Photoshop. The old DVD based installs don't work anymore with new Operating system, especially with the M1. All is well that ends well. So after spending some more time and a little money, we now have a functioning laptop that can finally recognize my external hard drives, do Photoshop and here we are.. posting about Pongal, three weeks later..

I also happened to have a double bone graft dental surgery which is still a pain in the face and have not recovered from it fully. Now that it is behind me, can blog in a happier note..

Where were we? Ah, pongal.. 

We made some delicious pongal, did a prayer and got some sun. . . 

of course there were vadais to go with the Pongal..

Then we tried a family portait.. it was a working day rush job.. but I was expected to have some "facial swelling" for a week.. so this was in anticiapation of that..

surprisingly there was no significant swelling post surgery. So we did get to take a decent family portrait just before Jr. was sent off.. they did co-operate this one for the photo on pity grounds.. so the dental surgery had one benefit at least..

There was no family and friends gathering to celebrate. Even last January, we had group gatherings to celebrate Pongal, before COVID did its thing. Hopefully by next Pongal things will be better.

Hope everyone had a good Pongal celebration. We live in surreal times.. we prayed for a better year!

The journey is what counts..

My fellow hikers have often heard me say that it is the journey that is more important.. so I take my time, stop for pictures, do the hike in an "alangaama kulungaama" way as my Grandma would put it. 

The hike marketing department (aka San and co.) sold me on the Lexington reservoir trail with the selling points being 

1. it is only a 5.2 mile hike compared to the recent 8+ mile hikes

2. It is part of the same preserve as Mt. Umunhum

3. It is a "moderate" hike per the all trails website.. so given recent history, a "piece of cake"

I am not allergic to the words "piece of cake" spoken in that sequence.

It turned out that this hike, while being 5.2 miles and in the same Sierra Azul preserve, is nothing but moderate!

It started off with a steep ascent like the ones they set you up on a rollercoaster ride.. except you think there is a drop after that.. in this case, it levels off for 100 feet and you go up another steep slope. By the time you went up to a lower grade, knees are shaking! 

At some points, I was pretty much trailing by a wide margin of a few hundred feet. we eventually crossed a quarry of sorts and made our way back on the loop trail. 

There were not many scenic spots or vista points with a view of the valley unlike other recent trails, but for once, the only sense of accomplishment was the destination.. the journey itself was not that great for me!

If you are one of those people who want to say "I did this trail".. then go for it. Try it when your stomach is not full.. I went just after lunch and struggled. My wife was also tired of my "are we there yet" questions.

There are always pictures..

A few more vista points or colorful paths might have made this more enjoyable for me.. I did have fun with the conversations and the occasional jokes, but not the hiking itself. Maybe a day with red skies would have made the lake views more interesting..

It is also possible that the previous hike to Foothills set the bar a little too high for this one to measure up..

and a pano of the view after we do the first part of the hike.. (after this there is no view of the lake)

At one point I was "offered" the option to go "just another 2.2 miles with a 1200 foot gain" to see Mt. Um from the other side and promptly passed on it before the sentence was finished!

Decent trail, but not enough vista (break) points for me..