That's funny, it didn't look Druish...

You've probably heard of it already, but in case you've been living under a rock: Stonehenge is a circle of stones erected quite some time ago in the south of England.  If you want more infos, drop some education on yourself here.

Stonehenge was on the agenda on Monday, our third full day in England.  Chris had to work, but Heather was free for some weekday adventuring.  They run some reasonably priced bus tours that make a day trip of it.  Of course, this is Britain, so the buses are really "coaches" and "reasonably priced" is measured in pounds, which are rather expensive these days.

It was really early morning when we left and slightly-less-early-but-still-pretty-early when we got to Stonehenge.  It was all foggy and stuff, but that just added to the mystical appeal.

Stonhenge rocks!  Puns don't!

You can walk around the whole thing on a path, but you're not allowed in unless it's the summer solstice, in which case it would be so crowded that you wouldn't fit.  They have little hand-held audio tour gizmos and in keeping with the ancient druidic traditions, there's a sizable gift shop.

Don't understate the hugeness of the object.

Neat though it might be, Stonehenge is kind of a "been there, done that" kinda thing.  I might be Californian, but it would take a level of hippiness advanced well beyond my own to amuse myself there amongst the rocks for an entire day.  The "coach" tour operators agreed and dedicated the remainder of your trip to the city of Bath.

Bath is also in the south of England, somewhat near to the border of Wales.  The city was founded in Roman times around some natural springs.  The springs were used for bathing, ergo "Bath."

The semi-preserved ruins of the old Roman baths were wrapped in a museum of sorts that we were able to walk through.  Pretty cool stuff.  There were tons of old columns, statues and the like.  Things were very historical.

Roman lifeguard?

The baths were in the shadow of a newer (but still old) cathedral in the town square.

This is Europe: a few hundred years old isn't old or new, but middle school (aka Middle Ages).

Bath is actually a pretty neat town in its own right.  Local ordinance requires all structures to be built out of the same sort of stone, so the skyline is pretty unique.

You can get a house in any color you'd like as long as it's light brown.

The river through town is the Avon (upon which Stratford famously is), and I found it to be awesome.  If I couldn't live on the ocean anymore, I'd want to live on a river.  Bath has a couple of old time-y bridges over the Avon, and a big weir.  

Birdies love Bridges

The weir

We had a little time before we had to catch our "coach," so we got to walk down the river for a bit.  They had a nifty little garden with a stone maze through some grass, a bunch of boats parked along the river's edge, a rugby stadium, another old church and some houses.

Heather and Melch enjoying the scenery 

Riverside walk on the Avon

Once back in town we picked up some pasties from a take-out joint and ate them on the trot as we did a quick walking tour of the downtown area before departing.  Back in London, we had kept the riverside theme alive by walking home to Putney from Hammersmith along the Thames.

Heather cooked us some tacos (another traditional British dish) and we hung out around the house until it was time for bed.

If you'd like to see more photos from this adventure, go here.

Drinko de Mayo

The "catching up" reports of the European trip will continue along with some race-based adventures that took place between then and now.  We'll interrupt that irregularly scheduled programming with a more current update: a look into a rare weekend spent entirely in town.

A roof is a crime when the sky looks like that.

Rainy season is over, June gloom has yet to come.  This is the Santa Barbara that we all pay the crazy rent to live in.  Friday was a nice top-down drive to the park for some lunchtime frisbee, then another drive after work to... another frisbee game.

Melch made our 900th smoothie in preparation for our Saturday morning ultimate game

Saturday morning we decided to mix it up with some frisbee on the beach, followed by some Cinco de Mayo tequila, beer and tacos at Casa Blanca downtown.  Met up with some friends in the afternoon for a walk up and down State St and some window shopping.  Home for a moment to shower the sand off from the early morning game and then off to the beach-front boat house for a sunset on the beach accompanied by a few more drinks and what is supposed to have been the largest (closest) full moon of the year.

Moon from Leadbetter, used the phone since I had loaned my good camera out

Sunset and moonrise complete, it was off to meet some co-workers at Dargan's.  When a bunch of them rolled out to catch the new Avenger's film, we decided to wrap things up by heading home for a bit of SNL viewing (Eli Manning and Rihanna: seen worse for sure) and then bed.

Sunday we didn't play frisbee!  Got up a bit late, then spent the morning working on some freelance work that I had gotten WAY behind on.  Work hard, party hard - gotta keep the balance there.

Chris, friend and past (Softshare) and present (RightScale) co-worker, has a brother Mike.  Brother Mike has himself a career as a percussionist.  Mike was going to be percussing in the service of the traveling musical "Hello My Baby," an affair which Chris recommended.  We went and can safely second and third his recommendation.

Warning: This song will be stuck in your head for the remainder of your day.

Between work and play (see that play on words there?!?), I hadn't found the time for lunch.  No food at home and didn't want to shop hungry, so we rolled by La Suparica on the way to Trader Joe's.  Ran into some friends there also (small town).  Packed up our eats and stopped by the beach for a bit to eat with a view.

"Interesting" car mods in front of us along the beach

Went home for a bit after dinner and shopping so that I could do more freelance work, but Chris and Mike were going to Dargan's so we popped out for a snack and a beer before bed.

Not bad for a three-day run, but I'm going to need to spend the rest of the week consuming my healthy eats from the Trader Joe's run in order to make up for the monetary and dietary cost of this weekend's festivities.

Kew Gardens

I used to work tech support with a man named James.  James was the guy that trained me on the software we supported after my hire and we shared a office for the purpose of that training.  "Feast or famine" would be a good way to describe the workload managed by workers in that position.  During the times of low volume, James and I would talk about all sorts of stuff.  I have a lot of interests and like to talk about them, and he was curious about everything and had a lot of questions.  It worked out.  He fell into a running joke that there was no subject that I wouldn't have something to say about and in fact began a quest to find the subject that would disprove his theory.  After a while I switched from support to engineering, but we still talked pretty frequently and he eventually found a subject that I knew absolutely nothing about.  That subject was botany.

Now, I told that story to tell this one: Heather, my awesome friend from TJ (high school), is a botanist.  She knows as much about that stuff as I don't, and she's been practicing her craft in England for a few years now.  Near as I can tell (and I've already admitted I'm not an expert), botany isn't like software development where you can do it anywhere with a computer and an internet connection.  You need, I should think, to go where the plants are.  When I was visiting, that meant curating the plant collection at a museum, but it had previously meant working at a botanical gardens.

Two mega-paragraphs in, we've discovered the Adventure of the Post!  On the third day of our trip to England, we visited Heather's prior place of employment: the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens.  Just because I couldn't tell a stamen from a pistil doesn't mean that I can't appreciate a royal garden when I see one.

Heather and Melch can also appreciate a royal garden when they see one.

Kew is, roughly speaking, a pretty big garden.  Or really, collection of gardens, green houses, research areas and, for some reason, peacocks.

Who doesn't like a peacock?

There's a Japanese-inspired garden, a nifty tower, a bunch of ponds, all that sort of good stuff.

Nothing says "England" like a Japanese garden

Thy had flowers too.

These flowers were pinkish white.

These flowers were whitish pink.

Heather likes flowers.

Melch also likes flowers.

Besides the flowers and towers and such, there was also a pretty neat tree-top walk.  You could see Wembley from up there, watch the planes on the approach to Heathrow, or just watch the kids running around the 100 foot tall walkway at unsafe speeds.  Whatever you were into.

Did I mention that there were flowers?

These flowers were yellowish-yellow.

Not pictured: some greenhouses, more flowers, sunset on a pond, etc.  You can see more here, if that's your kind of thing.

After Kew, we went to a favorite Vegan restaurant of Heather's where she ate good eats like it was her birthday.  Which it was.

London Town

Joshua Tree was awesome, but our 3/8ths life crisis was too severe to be conquered by desert camping alone.  A big international trip was in order.  After throwing about a bunch of ideas on a bunch of continents, we decided on England and Ireland.

Back in HS, Melch and many of our friends had gone to London, but I was unable to make the trip.  I'd always been a bit bummed about missing the experience.  The experience will stay missed, but the city is still there, and the city held some interest to me as the former place at the top of the world's largest empire.

More importantly, Heather had taken it as her adopted home and we hadn't seen Heather in a long time.  It's a progression that happens - you see someone every day in high school, then every few months through college, then yearly or less.  I've been fortunate enough to avoid that progression with a number of my good HS friends, but Heather and I had traveled in many different and mutually-distant directions.  Rhode Island and California for me, Texas, Florida, Washington (state) and London for her. Long story short: we were overdue!

To put some icing on the cake, it turns out that Ireland is close to England.  While this proximity hasn't always been a welcome fact for the Irish, it was a welcome fact for this partial-Irishman.  I'd always wanted to go and while it would be a bit rushed, I figured we could at least introduce ourselves to both countries in the vacation time allotted.  Putting yet MORE icing on the cake?  We could make it to Ireland for St. Patrick's Day!  That's a story for another post though.

Our initial reunion with Heather and our sightseeing foray into London is the traffic of this post's stage, and it begins as any good story should - with friends and food.

Heather and Melch sharing some eats in Heather's kitchen the evening after we arrived in London

 After putting our things down and (barely) gathering our bearings, we headed out for a tour of downtown Putney.  We picked up some loot along the way:

Send me and Melch to a European market and this is exactly the sort of stuff you'd expect us to return with

The Chief Engineer of the family goes to work

Dinner was pasta, after dinner there was yoga at Heather's local gym.  There might have been something after that, but you'd have to ask someone who was less jet-lagged at the time than I if you hope to find out what it was.

The next day was Saturday, but we got up early enough that it was still Friday by my body's watch.  No matter, we had plans.  London wasn't going to sightsee itself.  There's a bus/boat tour combination that shows off a bunch of the downtown London sites and we had tickets with our names on them.

Sweet looking riverside tavern on the Thames

Globe theater!  Wish we'd had time to go.  Next time!

Tower of London.  Pretty crazy stuff went down there, but it looks cool on the outside.

Obligatory

Parliament

Eye of London

First English pub ale.  Pub tourism was pretty high on my list of priorities.

Tower Bridge.  Less internationally famous than London Bridge, but way cooler

Not pictured?  Everything else!  Buckingham Palace, Baker St, a bunch of other London-y stuff.  After the tour we had some time for window shopping in the swanker areas of London like Piccadilly Circus and Regent St.  Not bad for a first day.

Joshua Three-Oh

Turning 30 is scary.  Any of you readers in your 40's are probably scoffing, but I'm sure there are folks in their 50's scoffing at you.

Anyway, I'm fortunate enough to have kept up with a bunch of my friends from HS.  Two of them were going to turn 30 the same weekend that I was.  One I had married and the other, Jennifer, lived not-so-far-away in Berkeley.

The plan was to get together for an adventure and Joshua Tree was selected.  Rounding out our party were Devin and Amy from HS, Lorelei (wife to Amy) and Ed (friend to Jennifer).  As a surprise, we also met up with Colin and Masha: friends from SB who had just that week relocated to Joshua Tree.

The first step was a quick trip down to Pasadena to gather at Amy's place.  We'd all meet there, spend the night, and organize a carpool out to the desert in the morning.  Good times were had.  Also cake.  Cake was had.

The morning drive was uneventful and we made it to the park in the early afternoon.  First stop was a hike through some big rocky hills that were in use by the local mountain climbers.  The sky was blue, the moon was out, and things were pretty.

           

Climbers

A certain mouse came along for the ride

Some mid-day moon

Within the confines of Joshua Tree, there exists a place known as the Pinto Basin.  Here I am surveying that (my) territory:

While in the basin, we ran into a bunch of plants and animals

Sunset found us among the silhouetted cacti, driving out of the park for our campsite.  Dinner was pasta, pudge pies and stew prepared over the fire.  Desert dessert?  S'more's of course!

Nutritious and/or delicious.

After waking up for a cold but stereotypically beautiful desert sunrise, we headed off for a sizable hike through the local mountains.

The Fellowship of the Desert

Mount-top panoramic

Mountains and trees and stuff

Before heading back to Pasadena, we stopped off at a local restaurant for some food and a surprisingly good bit of beer:

Was it good, or was that the post-hike beerlust talking?

 As birthday adventures go, our friendly local desert delivered.  Good times, good views, good friends, good beers.

Frist Psot!

Back in the day, we chronicled our adventures with song and rhyme.  These days, I've got some friends that do so using blogs with text and photo.  I was reading one of those and thought that I should do the same.

I promise to update it on a schedule of once every sometime, maybe.  If one is really adventuring, one doesn't have time to post about one's adventures, does one?

I'm going to start out by going backwards all the way to the limit of my memory, which I think will probably mean just before my 30th birthday.  Two months ago.

Be well,
Mr Pinto