Muir Woods

Well. We were supposed to be skiing today, but we learned a valuable lesson. People who live in the Bay area go to Tahoe, not Mammoth Lakes. There's a good reason for that -- you can't get to Mammoth Lakes from San Francisco during ski season. OK, that's not true, but it takes about twelve hours because you have to go around Yosemite N.P. In the summer, you can use CA 120 and exit the park via Tioga Pass. This is a relatively straight shot from S.F. To go around doubles the distance to 500 miles, and you still have to deal with, duh, snow in the mountains. Live and learn.

Instead of doing that, we went to Muir Woods State Park in Marin County. I'd never seen a Redwood Forest, and I really wanted to, and Tino agreed. The size of the trees is far less impressive than I expected, but the forest itself was beautiful in a different way than the woods in the east. The mountain height isn't it -- I think it's the fog and the sun through the tall trees. The woods out here even smell different than they do in the Appallachians. The eastern forests smell like humus and rotting leaves (which is actually a comforting smell somehow, not a bad smell at all.) Out here there are no leaves, just needles and the understory has something in it that gives off a spicy smell. It's a great smell, but different that what I'm used to.

On the way back, the fog lifted enough to give us a panoramic view of San Francisco from the Golden Gate bridge. The Transamerica building looks magical at that distance -- of course, skyscrapers are meant to be admired at a distance -- otherwise there is no scale or context for them. The northern most point is so treeless and dense with buildings that from far away, it almost looks like rock ledges instead of houses. As you get closer, it looks like a mediterranean city, which is very unlike anything else I've seen in the United States.

I think it goes without saying that I'd live in Marin County in a hearbeat. I really don't like Silicon Valley, and I can't understand why people pay such an incredible amount of money to live there. If I were going to pay that much and needed to live near San Jose, I think I'd go for the Portola Valley. It's quasi rural and it's beautiful. I also really like Palo Alto, but I can't imagine spending that kind of money for a tiny house and actually feeling good about it.