I also wanted to make another trip to put on my @trip page. I'm down to 6 trips in the top 16 of their featured trips. I almost gave up on creating a trip this time, though. Their software crashed twice. It seems pretty unstable. It does strange things to my pictures files if I have it and Picasa open at the same time. Fortunately, it doesn't do unrecoverable things.
The parking lot was overflowing. I've never seen so many cars there. Maybe most people hike there in the middle of the day. I'm usually there just before sunset.
The ocotillos have leaves.
Since it was so middle-of-the-dayish, the lighting wasn't very good for pictures. I did everything I could but a lot of them look pretty washed out.
I saw my first Mexican gold poppies of the season.
With all those cars on the parking lot, you know there were a lot of people on the trails. Here's a few of them.
This ocotillo has flowers.
From up at the top, you can see the trails far below.
My house is in this direction.
A couple of strange things happened up at the saddle. When I first got up there a really loud and obnoxious guy asked me if I was OK, as if I looked really sick or something. My hair was a little messed up from the wind, but come on. He offered gorp to everybody that walked by. Nobody took any. They looked at him and moved away quickly. There was something about the way he talked that grated on your nerves. The words were normal, even polite, but the inflections, the tones, the timing were all just a little bit off. He warned me about a beehive in the direction I was going. That's a nice thing to do. What he didn't say, but what I heard implied was, "I know you're the kind of idiot that pokes beehives with sticks, but don't do it this time". I've decided that he is either an alien or he has a basement full of dead bodies. Or maybe he's an alien with a basement full of dead bodies. I think Lindsey delivered a pizza to him last week, too.
The next strange thing is that I ran into somebody I know up there. It's strange because I don't know a lot of people and not a lot of people I know go hiking and even though the trail was crowded today, by shopping mall standards it was practically vacant. This guy used to work at Medtronic (where I work now), and before that we were at TI at the same time.
I enjoyed talking to several people on the hike. It was kind of funny, sometimes. A couple would stop and we would all be talking. Then the guy would start wandering on down the trail. His wife would keep glancing at him as he continued on his way, getting more concerned looking with each step he took. You could tell she wanted to leave and catch up with her husband but either didn't want to end the conversation or couldn't. They would finally say, "Oh, I'd better go before I lose him" and take off.
Today is the first time somebody said something about me having two cameras around my neck. He said, "You must take a lot of pictures". They were a very nice couple, probably in their 80's. His wife and I talked about Mexican gold poppies as he wandered down the trail snapping pictures.
 |
| 2009_02_07 |
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment