A drive down the peninsula

Ah what a long time between posts! Not for want of photos, mind you, more because there are so many photos to put online and yap about. And excuse the overly wide shots for this blog layout...

So a little while ago, we went for a drive



down to Heronswood, a house built in the 1860s about 80km out of Melbourne. Actually, I lie, we drove down to visit the Digger's Club nursery and have lunch at the café there. (Not many cafés have set menus of locally grown food for $50 for two courses though!)


Along the way we saw a drive in with two screens! Drive ins are a rarity these days and one iwth two screens Of course it is near the beach in a touristy sort of area...

Heronswood has a lovely view of Port Phillip, aka "the Bay." The Bay was quite calms that day and the views were amazing - much better than the camera can depict. We could see the City quite clearly (what 60km away?) and even Mt Macedon, which is well beyond the City.



Very pretty!


(Excuse the power pole in the pic :-)

We were hungry and in a hurry to get to the café... but things like this were in the way.



There's lots of gardens at Heronswood but we didn't have time to go and look at them. We just saw the gardens around the café. We were hungry, remember? DH was galloping to the café and MiL was not far behind.


The café prides itself on using locally grown produce, including herbs and bits and bobs from borders like these:

(The bees were going nuts over the allium flowers. Totally nuts!)


My entrée (note that entrées are well entrées in Australia, not main meals). Swanky! My first ever terrine :-)


Mmm, lunch!

After lunch, I admired the kapok trees


and we visited the nursery and bought waaay too many fruit trees. DH has ideas of being self sufficient. I have images of every rainbow lorikeet and flying fox on the eastern seaboard eating our fruit before we get to!

On the way home, we popped into a winery - FiL had very much enjoyed their wine with his lunch!


And finally started the drive home, around the end of the Dandenongs. (The car we were in looked very similar to the silver one in the pic, only not the same cos that would be very odd indeed!)

A drive up Mt Hamilton and back again

Two Sundays ago, we went for a drive up Mt Hamilton.

From down in SJ, Mt Hamilton is marked by some white lumps on top of a rather bald mountain to the east. It doesn't look like much from down here and our last attempt to get to the top of the mountain (about 14 months ago) was stymied by snow!


SJ foothills

Anyway, the drive up the mountain is fun. You first have to cross over the foothills, on a pretty narrow and rather windy road, cross a meadow/valley and then wind wind wind up to the top of the mountain itself. I would not recommend this road for anyone who gets carsick but for the rest of us? Woo hoo! It is soooo windy that you can't actually go that fast up it, especially when much of the road is stuck on the side of a rather steep hill - one side is often cutting/cliff and the other is a biiiig drop. And when the wind blows (it is windy as well as windy!) then it can be exciting indeed!

But we were just as enamoured of the spring wildflowers.

Just over the top of the foothills we found these in a sheltered, northfacing cutting;



Dodecatheon hendersonii - shooting stars. I was so excited to see these. We didn't see any last year but we didn't go to the right places. They are fairly common but to me they are the orchids of the primula world and I love to see them.


Californian Buttercups

There were also nemophila and some other things I cannot recognise due to low light and lots of wind blurring the pics.


I am fascinated by the oaks here - they are all twisty and gnarly :-)





One particular sheltered hillside was a riot of all sorts of things.


Delphiniums and dodecatheons dominate this pic. I didn't realise there were so many delphiniums (larkspurs) and so many lived here!


Cynoglossum grande - the flower looks like a very large forget me not. It's in the same family.


(This pic is best seen in a larger size so click on it to see delphiniums, dodecatheons, blue dicks and others. Yes, there is a plant commonly called blue dicks. Ahem!)


I think this is a blue dick (Dichelostemma capitatum). They were pretty hard to get pics of due to the wind and our unwillingness to step into the verge. We have a complete paranoia of poison ivy/oak and also hate squashing plants.


D'oh! Two deer, two (presumed) female deer!


Out of focus lupines and a nice valley.



After winding winding winding our way up the road, we came in sight of our destination



Now with fricken lasers! Really! They now use laser spotters to help line telescopes up. This telescope is over 100 years old and is still in constant use. It was and still is an amazing piece of machinery. It is so delicately balanced it can be lined up by a single person. You can read more about it here and more about the Lick Observatory complex here. (I am very pleased with this handheld shot - it is quite sharp and is limited only by the ISO of the camera rather than me shaking the shot.)


The Lick dude himself, well a bust of him. The guided "tour" (we didn't go anywhere, just stayed in the observatory itself) described him in glowing terms but I am not that sure he was a fantastically nice guy.


Me, chilling outside the observatory (which was rather cold!).


Nathan chilling even more in the brisk wind - he forgot to bring a jacket.


A bad pic of us at the observatory.


I call these ouchcones, not pinecones.


The long and winding road.


All of these hills and valleys are caused by the Pacific Plate grinding against the North American plate. They are very scenic when they are green.




Nathan called this a mushroom farm - I can see why!

On the way back down we saw other plants,


like these Indian Paintbrushes (Castilleja foliolosa I think)




Lathyrus vestitus?


Checker blooms in the middle of common fiddleneck (I think!)


Lupines and poppies on the foothills roadside.

A circular drive

Today we went for a nice drive, courtesy of Nathan's boss. We showed a potential new hire and his girlfriend around a bit of Santa Cruz and then up the coast and across through the redwoods in the coastal range. (I am pleased to report that we didn't actually drive through any trees, just past them.)

We had lunch by the marina, where it was grey when we first sat down



and then brightened up by the time we had finished:



The heiferweizen was a little shaken up it seems - someone had problems pouring it without a huge head.


We walked up almost to the mouth of the river (you can see the dredger and its pipeline in the pic above) to admire the Pacific and the lighthouse.




The breakwater/groin that the lighthouse sits on is made up of concrete "shapes" which totally fascinated me. Obviously the local sandstoney type rock is not impervious enough to the pounding of the waves. (see natural bridges below)

We then found Cliff Road after doing a little tour of the boardwalk area (no pics) and drove up to Natural Bridges. Looking south from the carpark, we saw


BLUE!

And looking north?


GREY! (note there is only one bridge left - I guess the same fate befell the second arch to the mainland as befell our London Bridge in Victoria.)

Which direction were we going in? Guess? Guess why there are no pics of the coastline or of the wildflowers (native and weedy) along the coastline? So we drove up to Pescadero, with brief views of a cloudy and veiled Pacific Ocean on our left, no kite surfers, past rudey nudey Bonny Doon Beach.... Interestingly it was a little clearer up in the mountains! So we stopped on Alpine Road for a little walk through the redwoods.




These are only bubby coastal redwoods - nothing like the ones we saw at Muir Woods and not to be confused with the giant sequoias that live say at Yosemite.



Quite a number of plants are in flower at present in the redwoods or are about to be in flower.

Redwood sorrel, or Oxalis oregana, or Oregon sorrel. The flowers were not very open.



Cardamine californica or milkmaids (different to our milkmaids at home!). The one in the pic below has pointy leaves - I presume it is the same plant as it has the same flower structure.


After a long afternoon of looking, gawping, knitting (for me) and blathering (oops, me again), we hopped across to the Sonoma Chicken Coop for dinner with knitty/crochetty friends and home with a magnificent sunset at our backs.