Sunday, July 24, 2005

The Many Adventures of Aidan and Daddy

Yesterday, we went to the city of Martinez. It's about 15 miles north of us, lying right along the Carquinez Strait. The Strait is the body of water connecting San Francisco and San Pablo Bays. Anyway, our first chore was to go to Wal Mart. Interestingly, northern Californians are pretty anti Wal Mart, so that the nearest one to our house. Wal Mart was okay, but not really much of an adventure. Next, we went to Carquinez Strait regional Park for a climbing adventure--and here's where it get interesting.


While Daddy sort of hoped that by going close to the water, the temperature would be cooler, it wasn't. Its was about 94 degrees when we set off on our hike. Our goal was to make it up to the top of a 700' mountain (our elevation was about 100') so that we could get a view of both bays, the strait, and several harbors. The climb up the mountain was interesting. We walked along a dry stream bed for most of the way. There was enough water (from the stream apparently) to support a good sized forest. It was much cooler under the forest canopy than in the sun. About two-thirds of the way up, it got very steep. I got a little scared and had Daddy carry me for parts of the journey up. Finally, we made it to the top. We found a bench and Daddy snapped a couple of pictures of me relaxing.









We saw a tug boat and a big cargo ship motoring around the port. I asked Daddy to take some shots of these and here are a couple.










Finally, Daddy took a couple of shots of just me. I liked playing with gradient fields in Photoshop to make these interesting pictures. We put all of these in our growing scrapbook.





We had a lot of fun going down the mountain, becuase the path was sufficiently dusty, we could kind of "skate" down the steep places. Daddy would say "ooooooohhhhhhh" as he went down, which was very funny.

After we made it home, Mommy was astonished about how dirty and dusty her two boys were. Of course, that happens when you go on adventures. Here's a link to the photos of our adventure.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love those Andy Warhol pictures!

However, climbing on slippery terrain is not among my favorite things to do!

But then, I'm not the most sure-footed person in the world.

Did look like you had fun!

Love,

ATM said...

I didn't like climbing up some of the steeper parts. When it got too scary cause of the slipperiness I asked Daddy to carry me. I had more fun sliding down on the way back though.