A rose garden, a sunset, and a city by a bay… part 5…

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Okay, I swear, we are almost done with these.

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Just one more post to go… after this one…

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Wait… those aren’t roses… I think that is a honeysuckle… why is that in the Berkeley Rose Garden?

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Or it might be a poppy.

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Sometimes photos in low light just don’t come out exactly how you want them to…

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But then again, sometimes they come out looking cool in unexpected ways.

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But I am getting pretty good at the daylight photos.

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And some of the night ones turn out good enough.

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That is almost the same shot as the one above. Ironically, this is what happens when you use the flash on something that is too far way for the light to reach.

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You can almost smell the roses.

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Boats and a bridge.

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I like colors.

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Colors make the world go around.

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A rose garden, a sunset, and a city by a bay… part 4…

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I should have used that photo for a caption contest post:

“Stella!”

But I can see how you might be confused about how raccoons fit into this series of posts. I was confused too.

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The last thing I expected to see on Treasure Island, where I went to take some photos of the sunset and the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco, were a bunch of raccoons. It is an island, connected to San Francisco and Oakland only by a big bridge.

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But there were so many raccoons that someone threw away a perfectly good one. Ha!

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Okay, that might explain why there are so many… but still… she had to get there somehow.

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I am just trying to finish up these pictures from two days ago so we can move on to the dozens of photos I took on my adventure yesterday.

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I am falling behind.

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It was a little weird taking these pictures while a bunch of raccoons were scrambling all around me.

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They look cute, but they are wild animals, and can be quite vicious.

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So anyway, enjoy the pictures.

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I suppose it doesn’t matter if you follow along with the story or not.

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But I like the stories.

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I turned around from the view of the city to take a shot of the newly-rebuilt Eastern half of the Oakland Bay Bridge. That bridge, and two others, will play a big part in my adventure of yesterday… which were still tomorrow… when I took these… if you see what I mean.

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A rose garden, a sunset, and a city by a bay… part 3…

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What is this all about?

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What do these things have in common?

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Is that the Golden Gate Bridge way over there?

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How do these things tie together?

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How did you get photos of San Francisco from this angle?

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Why are these roses exceptionally beautiful?

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Why did they build a prison on a small island?

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Where can I go to smell these roses?

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Why are people sailing when it is almost dark?

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Why are we asking all these questions?

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When is this post going to be over?

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And what the heck is that raccoon doing here?

Some of these questions can be answered by reading the earlier posts in this series. The raccoon one I will answer in the next post. I have no idea why people want to sail in the dark. And the Alcatraz one, you could Google that… I assume it seemed like a good place to keep prisoners, what with being surrounded by cold water full of dangerous currents and Great White Sharks.

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Reflecting upon nature… part 21…

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Look, I taught my pet dolphins to stay…

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I got kissed by a horse today…

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Okay, it is a long story. I had an awesome adventure today.

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These are just a few cell phone selfies I took at one stop on my Bay Area adventure.

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I also got snuggled by a horse with one blue eye.

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She was very nice too.

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And these weren’t riding stable horses. This was a herd of semi-wild range ponies.

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There were about thirty of them. I managed to get 4 or 5 to come over and say hi… because babies, dogs and horses love me.

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But I am not going to tell you about today’s adventure until I finish with yesterday’s adventures, which won’t happen until tomorrow… so… uh…

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But anyway, I met a really sweet new friend today. I saw mountains, forests, beaches, towns and cities, and a bunch of neat stuff. Because that is the irony of being a compulsive blogger. I could have stayed indoors and done posts from yesterday, but I had to go out and get some material for posts I won’t get too for a few days.

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And it was so worth it.

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A rose garden, a sunset, and a city by a bay… part 2…

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Yeah, it was that kind of sunset, and I almost missed it.

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If you don’t know why roses are popping up in here, you didn’t read the first post in the series.

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There I was, last night, stuck in traffic heading towards the toll booths on the Oakland Bay Bridge…

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Watching as the sun slid into the Pacific Ocean…

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Watching my chances of taking good photos of this sunset slip away…

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Fuming at the delay just as the cars around me were fuming into the atmosphere…

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Take a deep breath. Smell the roses.

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But I made it to Treasure Island in the middle of the bay, in time to get some pretty good shots.

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And I have a lot more of them to share… after I get back from today’s adventure.

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Reflecting upon nature… part 20…

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Okay… I swear… this is the last reflecting water post… that contains a waterfall… HA!

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A rose garden, a sunset, and a city by a bay… part 1…

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Another thing I like to do when visiting my  mom in the Bay Area is drive up to the Berkeley Rose Garden. It is part of the University of California, Berkeley, and rose breeders from all over the world send clippings there, so you see roses that might only exist in two places in the world.

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It also has some nice views, although it was rather hazy yesterday.

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This is why the blog is so good for me. I go out and do stuff, so I have pictures to share with you.

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The thing is… (hello, thing, where have you been hiding?)… I tend to take a lot of pictures. I try to get rid of the boring ones, the repetitive ones. But I do hate wasting them. which is why we end up with so many posts labeled as part 1 and part 2 and so on.

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But you know I have crack squirrels living in my head, right? So…

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San Francisco was shy yesterday, peeking out of the haze. But don’t worry… because I did something else yesterday that will peal away the mystery.

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There is a reason that I like both roses and sunsets…

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It is because no two are ever alike, even from one minute to the next, as light changes and moves. Throw in my favorite city, and you have a pretty nice mix… which is what I am going to be doing for a few days… mixing pictures of roses and these photos, that I took from Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay… just as the sun was setting.

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Because that is where I went last night. The thing is… (oooooh, a double thing post!)… that I am going on another adventure today, and I don’t know where I am going to end up… but it will start in those hills just to the right of the Golden Gate Bridge.

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Reflecting upon nature… part 19…

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The sun, the moon, the fog and the city…

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Okay, here they are, the last photos from my drive up into the hills above Berkeley, California, to watch the sun set last night.

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I also took a few photos of the moon. I think they came out pretty good considering I didn’t have a tripod. I just steadied the camera on the top of my car. I had no idea the zoom lens was that good. I mean, the photos get saved really big, and I cropped the photo all the way down… but you can see craters!

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The fog did play a huge part in these pictures.

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And so did the clouds… and that contrail or whatever it was. But there was, as I mentioned in an earlier post, more than one kind of fog blowing around last night.

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There was a low, coastal fog, that obscured San Francisco, and blew in front of the setting sun…

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It mingled with the clouds and added depth to the photos…

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But when I drove just a little higher up into the hills, I drove into more fog…

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Okay, I don’t actually know if this is high fog or low clouds…

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But whichever it was, it didn’t help the sunset any,

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One more gratuitous picture of the moon.

 

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