While my mom was in town we took a trip to the Sunol Regional Wilderness to do some hiking. We followed the same route that Robert and I took back in November, though we didn’t have enough time to make the jaunt to the highest point in the park. It took us just over 2.5 hours to make the loop, feeding Kaija once. We got back to the car 10 minutes before the park closed!

My mother was in town at the end of March so we decided to head back to Filoli to see what had changed since we had been there with Jennifer’s mother at the beginning of the month. Some daffodils were still blooming, but the highlights of this trip were the wisteria and the tulips. By chance, we also ran into my cousin Don and his family who live nearby in Belmont. Filoli was just as photogenic as last time, though the atmosphere was slightly different with the different flowers in bloom. There were also more people wandering through the gardens, which made it much more challenging to take photographs of the grounds.

We spent the weekend of March 20th at Lake Tahoe with our friends Matt and Minette. It was a pretty relaxing trip that included a nice leisurely snowshoe excursion near Mt. Rose. The temperature was very warm – around 70 degrees Fahrenheit – so we all stripped down to our base layers shortly into the hike. Because the sun was so bright on the spring snow, photographs became fairly difficult. These are the few photographs that turned out well enough or were salvageable by adjusting brightness levels. The last photograph is from a short stroll we took along Donner Lake.

Sandy, Leon, Jennifer, Kaija and I had a great weekend away from the hustle and bustle of the Bay Area March 12-14 at the Point Arena Lighthouse, about 125 miles north along the coast from San Francisco. We stayed in the living quarters adjacent to the lighthouse. As it turns out, this location was used in the filming of the moving starring Mel Gibson called Forever Young. The gazebo seen in some of the photographs was built for the movie. The lighthouse beacon is not currently operational but should be by the end of the summer. The beach in the photographs is at Manchester State Park, located a few miles north of Point Arena. The funky building near the end of the album is the Sea Ranch Chapel, a non-denominational place of worship located along Highway 1 south of Point Arena.