Wow, almost a month!

Somehow it's been almost a month since I last blogged.  It's been mostly kind of dull (which I don't mind at all!) and a little excitement.  It's getting something over 100F (38C) most days but that's pretty normal.  We like to get out before 06:00 for our walk and it takes at least 50 minutes.  We aren't power walking so talking about what the neighbors are doing in their yards, etc. takes time.  There is also the big discussion about what's for breakfast!

Last last month we flew to San Francisco for four days to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary.  That was fun.  We stayed in a place on Hyde Street where we could go up on the roof and see Alcatraz.

The hotel is part of Wyndham's Shell Vacations Club.  We don't belong but they let a few rooms to civilians I guess.  Anyway, it was a nice little 1 bedroom apartment.  It wasn't cheap but nothing in the city is.  The rooftop area is clearly quite small but there aren't a lot of apartments in the place.  As you can see we had great weather and even managed to get a little sunburn.  Grrr!  Here we leave the desert and get a sunburn in what is supposed to be a nice foggy city. 

This is looking the opposite direction.  It was taken over looking what had been the parade ground.  There were quite a few parts of the island that were off limits.  We were there at a time when the birds have had their young and the park service didn't want us disturbing the birds.  They were everywhere!

We like to just walk around so did a pretty good job of covering the tourist water front from Pier 33 where the Alcatraz boat docks over to the Presidio.  We had two days of over 10,000 steps per my wife's Fitbit.  When we wanted to go farther or come back in comfort we used Uber.  The rides were in the $10-13 dollar range which we thought was pretty reasonable.  The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is reasonably nice to older tourists:  round trips from the airport to downtown and back were $9 each for seniors.

We like to take a ride around town sometimes and this time we took a Hop-On-Hop-Off bus tour.  It was 2.5 hours roundtrip but we got to see quite a bit of the city AND it took us across the Golden Gate Bridge where you could catch another bus to Sausalito if you wished:  we didn't.  I must admit going across the bridge was a chilly trip.

We got home and resumed that quiet life until just yesterday.  For the 4th of July nature threw us a party:  an earthquake!  The quake, 6.4 in magnitude, was centered in Searles Valley in California but we sure felt it here!  By the road it is 160 miles away but it is actually only 84 miles away.  (I use a great site called Freemaptools.com to give me the distances.)  It was quite a long quake and our house got quite a shake.  All that lead me to checkout earthquakes around here and I found www. earthquaketrack.com.  We get a lot more that I ever imagined.

Well, that's all the news that's fit to print.  Thanks for stopping by.  Have a good one.