Travel Ahead, Dipsea Trail, Anonymous Fame, Oysters

Likely destinations for the upcoming mega-trip: Italy, Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Denmark, The Netherlands, England, Iceland.

My days in San Francisco are numbered. Soon, I’ll be putting stuff into storage and traveling to Europe with J for an extended trip to a variety of countries we’ve never been to before. Where we end up afterward is still undecided, and all of the uncertainty is the cause of both excitement and nervous teeth grinding.

Everything is dry again. The mushrooms have died, the grass is getting yellow, and the air is dusty.

A sea of mushrooms. Potato digging hand for scale.

Potassium storage.

Urban corn.

One Saturday, J and I drove to Stinson beach and did a seven mile Dipsea Trail loop around the beautiful hills. The views included shady, ivy-filled woods, nearly dry creeks, rolling grassy hills, redwood forest, and the ocean. My flip flops performed admirably.

Afterward, we ate a filling dinner and played board games in Bolinas.

Dipsea bridge.

Waterfall.

Spanish moss.

The shady side.

J in sunset lighting.

Our trail buddies.

The unshaded hills.

Slippery rocks.

The start of the descent.

Nevermore.

Father and son.

A mighty trunk.

Redwoods.

Twisting and turning down the hill.

Approaching Stinson Beach.

Sleepy Hollow.

My first game of Ticket to Ride.

I’ve gotten bored with neighborhood strolls since it feels like I’ve seen everything in a twenty block radius around the apartment.

A Richmond sunset church.

Sadness tableau.

Just your average sack of chicken feathers.

Door to nowhere.

Coaxial cable punctures stone.

This month, the Golden Gate was closed to traffic for the weekend so they could install a new zippered barrier in the middle. J and I got out their early and biked across to enjoy the rare view.

I achieved a minor life goal by making it to the front page of Reddit with a photo I took of the bridge. The post got over a thousand comments, and the image got over two million views.

For the day or two that this post blew up, I had the biggest smile across my face.

Sailing into darkness.

A rare view of an empty Golden Gate Bridge.

Symmetry.

Expansion joint.

Red moss at Baker Beach.

Moody lighting.

Another Bridge view.

Last weekend, we drove north again to Hog Island Oyster Company and enjoyed the company of friends of friends and their well mannered baby.

Hog Island oysters.

Old propellers.

Short boat.

I always thought they were trash.

One tray of oysters. Not pictured: more trays of oysters.

Shell barrow.

Chute broom.

Crunch time.

The little red church.

Windy road.

The Others.

Last night, the kitchen was an explosion of dirty bowls and exotic ingredients for me to make a Thai dinner with.

I botched the meal by not following recipes. The papaya salad was spicy but not balanced in flavor. The phanaeng curry was too strong. The larb salad tasted too strong of chicken. The mangos for the mango sticky rice sucked.

I’m out of cooking practice, in part because it is such a pain to go grocery shopping.

Making Thai food.

The inside of a green papaya is fairly terrifying.

There are just a few more domestic posts to go before this blog goes international again.

Even though blogs are dead, I’m hoping to get back into the swing of things.