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Coasting.53

Last Pacific coastal shots for a while…though I might have something left from Hong Kong that I could drag out if I had to, but not a very high-quality shot, for sure :-). Bodega head, looking south toward Point Reyes peninsula in the shots below.

County Views.123

View from a Lake County Winery with some of those hills also in northern Napa County. Second-to-last evening of my most recent stateside visit.

Urban Canals.133

Last canal photos from my day trip to Leiden way back in February 🙂

City Views.183

Having shown you some graffiti art of more or less this very thing in a recent post, imagine my delight when, on Sunday, for the very first time I saw vintage trains (related to the tram museum which is also somehow affiliated with this whole affair) rolling down these very tracks and right past that very mural, clanging their bells loudly since most pedestrians walk along the tracks these days. 🙂

A Family Interlude

 

In the early 1930s, my mother’s parents moved in the middle of the great depression from Nebraska down to Texas so my grandfather could take a job in the chemistry department at Texas A&M. Both my mother and aunt were born there, and for that reason my aunt, cousins, one brother & my nephew all returned four years after my mother’s passing to Texas to enjoy time with each other and think about memories and family history. When we made it to the campus of Texas A&M, Aunt Judy was delighted to notice a bench dedicated to the memory of a professor whom she recalls my grandmother mentioning often when she was younger. The family moved on in the early 1940s to Long Beach, CA, and hasn’t had any ongoing contact with Texas A&M or as a state since, so it was fun to realize that our grandfather would near-certainly have taught in that very building you see, since the plaque says it was opened in 1929. 🙂 Also, we found the address they lived in at one point (us all on the porch of a house), though we suspect this building was built more recently. And as you see above, we did recreate our own new family photo in a field of Texas bluebonnets, in tribute to the photo of Mom & Judy as youngsters, likely by the side of the road as we are here.

 

Small Wonders.182

From a building façade in Austin. The marvels one can enjoy when wandering the streets!
Gallery

City Views.182

County Views.122

Yes, we’ve shown you Bodega Head before. But can one really have too much of such beauty? 🙂

From the Air.2

Albuquerque from the air, en route to that lovely long family weekend in Texas at the end of March & early April. We’ve shown you similar views before.

Islands.22

As I’ve mentioned, the blog in general and – more specifically – these numbered “series” that I’ve done the past few years tend to get me out the door, with an eye and mind open to something interesting or lovely (or both) in the physical world around me. Having launched this “Islands” series from my trip to Madeira last December, and being now in this numbers thing (a few of you may have noticed that I’ve gone sequential and numerically rhyming in the entries, to the extent manageable) …well, I needed to get more Islands to photograph! And it turns out I’ve already, unbeknownst to me, shown you any number of photos a few little islands in the ponds that adorn my beloved next-door park, good ol’ Vondelpark. That’s an island, behind the duck: who knew?!

It’s fun to create rules for oneself which give one the opportunity experience the world afresh, in a brief moment of pre-thunderstorm sun.

Country Canals.32

Village Views.42

More of those dramatic snow-capped mountains in the Kurdish Region or northern Iraq.