I took my mom up the the Berkeley hills.

I took these photos from that spot you might remember from our trip to the Bay Area not long ago when we saw Hamilton. We also saw the smoke rising from across the bay while we waited to go on that awesome rocket boat ride.

This is the view from beside those lovely trees that almost burned in that fire. You can still smell the burnt area.

But my favorite trees were spared, and the view is still lovely.

It was a close thing.

We tried to do some bird watching, but the birds were not cooperating.

So we went and had lunch.