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We left sunny Tucson in November 2021 and returned to California for the holidays. We had planned a number of holiday gatherings but with the omicron variant raging we limited our plans. We celebrated an early Christmas with Andy and Heather in Oakland and we visited friends near Paso Robles and family in Camarillo during December but otherwise we kept to ourselves and remained healthy.

During early December we stayed in a beautiful little craftsman bungalow in Martinez, along the Sacramento River delta near its exit into San Francisco Bay. Martinez is one of the older towns in California and it was once home to John Muir. We enjoyed walks around the old downtown and along the wetlands that border the delta. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.

We traveled south for the Christmas and New Years holidays and did some petsitting for friends in Ventura while they were in Italy. We watched a little dog and two cats. We enjoyed the warm weather, the abundant palm trees, and walks along the beach path in Ventura. No matter how far we travel, Southern California always feels like home.

After the holidays we settled into a small house for the winter. It is in Citrus Heights, an eastern suburb of Sacramento. It is only about a year old and it is very comfortable and stylish. We are still being careful with Covid so we keep to ourselves for the most part, enjoying daily walks in the area. We are hopeful that Covid will subside soon and we can enjoy more travel later in the year.

We have visited Tucson many times and we were happy to return in October to petsit for friends who were going on vacation. Rox is a friendly little cockapoo who loves to go on walks and check out all the places where other dogs have been. Trill is a black cat with a white patch on her front. She got her name because she likes to be scratched while she eats and she makes a trilling purring sound while doing so. While in Tucson we also got to visit with friends and family, and we had an early Thanksgiving dinner in early November. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.

We were in Tucson for Halloween and many of our neighbors decorated their homes and yards.

Our neighborhood was near the edge of the desert and there were lots of great walking spots nearby. Walks near the end of the day often featured spectacular desert sunsets. The fall weather was perfect for walking.

Our neighborhood was located at the base of the Tortolita Mountains and we were a very short drive from the Tortolita Preserve. This 2,400 acre park has set aside a beautiful undisturbed habitat for native desert plants and wildlife. The Sonoran Desert is naturally verdant, with large stands of saguaro, cholla, palo verde, mesquite, and other desert plants. The preserve has an extensive trail system and Charlie enjoyed hiking there on many occasions.

Saguaro National Park has two separate units on the outskirts of Tucson, one on the east side and one on the west side of the city. Both preserve spectacular stands of saguaro cacti. We visited both the east and west units on separate days and enjoyed some of the trails through the beautiful desert.

Tohono Chul is a desert botanical garden on the north side of Tucson. We enjoyed walking through their desert gardens and we had brunch at their restaurant. We sat outside and the local bees were very interested in our food.

We left Grants Pass, Oregon, in mid-September en route to Walla Walla, Washington, for a couple of weeks of petsitting for a dog and a cat, arranged through TrustedHousesitters. But first we spent a couple of days around Portland to do some sightseeing. On our first day we crossed the Columbia River into Washington to visit Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, the site of a huge volcanic explosion in 1980. The area of destruction is impressive and we were fortunate to visit on a clear day when the entire devastated area was visible. On the drive to the mountain we passed through acres of Noble fir trees planted to replace those harvested in logging operations decades ago. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.

On our second day around Portland we headed west along the Columbia River to Astoria, near the river’s mouth at the Pacific. There we visited Fort Clatsop, part of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Park. The Lewis and Clark expedition spent the winter of 1805-06 at the fort before they headed back east in the spring. A replica of their fort has been built at the site, and it is impressive to see how crowded and rough the living conditions were. Of particular interest was a salt production facility about 15 miles south on the Pacific shore. A small crew spent about two months at this location boiling and evaporating saltwater to harvest salt for the trip home.

We had never visited Walla Walla so it was an adventure to spend a couple of weeks getting to know this lovely town. If your image of Washington is of evergreens and temperate rain forests, well, Eastern Washington is nothing like that. The region consists of arid semi-desert but with ample water in the Columbia River Basin to support agriculture. Wheat has been a major crop over the years but during the past few decades a vibrant wine industry has emerged in the Walla Walla Valley. There are over a hundred small wineries in the region and it has become a wine destination. We didn’t do any wine tasting ourselves but we enjoyed taking drives in the countryside to see the vineyards and wineries.

We stayed in a house in one of the beautiful older neighborhoods in central Walla Walla, a great neighborhood for walking. The well-kept old homes and mature trees reminded us of our old neighborhood in Woodland. We were petsitting for a dog and a cat. Genji is a Shiba Inu, a Japanese breed known for their intelligence and independence. He is ten years old, around our age in dog years, and we got along splendidly. He enjoyed morning and afternoon walks in the neighborhood and he would make his presence known if we encountered another dog, making sure that our territory was protected. Tiger Lily is only a year old so she still has some of her playful kitten characteristics. One of her favorite tricks was to hide in the bushes and playfully pounce on Genji when he returned from his walk. Genji, for the most part, just ignored her.

Downtown Walla Walla has been rejuvenated in recent decades with the rise of the wine industry. It was featured by Sunset Magazine as one of the best small-town main streets in the West. It was fun to stroll around downtown and peer at the shops, restaurants, and tasting rooms that cater to the tourists. It seemed like there are at least two dozen tasting rooms in the downtown area, augmenting the tasting rooms at the wineries around the region.

Whitman College is a well-regarded liberal arts college in Walla Walla. It has an array of sculpture displayed throughout the beautiful campus. We spent part of an afternoon strolling around campus and admiring the sculpture.

Pioneer Park is Walla Walla’s main city park. It has a large aviary with a variety of birds from around the world. The aviary was very impressive for a small city like Walla Walla.

We made several short day trips around the Walla Walla region. Just outside of town is the Whitman Mission National Historic Site, a National Park Service facility documenting the history of a mission settled in 1836 by Marcus Whitman, a physician and Christian missionary. Whitman and his party made friends with the local Cayuse Tribe and for several years their outpost was a welcome stop for settlers traveling along the Oregon Trail. But by 1847 the Cayuse suspected that Whitman was trying to poison them and they killed him along with about a dozen of his group. The backlash to this killing among Americans in the eastern states led to immense cruelty toward Native Americans in the coming years, and also led to the establishment of the Oregon Territory to help the federal government control events in the Pacific Northwest.

The historic site also chronicles the life and culture of the Cayuse and other local tribes. The Cayuse were somewhat nomadic, moving every few months to take advantage of seasonal food supplies. A park ranger demonstrated how the Cayuse would erect their tipis at each new location.

Mill Creek runs through the center of Walla Walla and the city has established a network of bicycle and pedestrian trails that extend well out of town. We enjoyed walks along these trails, often seeing water birds along the way.

On several days we drove around the region and admired the beautiful vineyards and wineries. Most of the wineries are fairly new and many have tasting rooms with striking modern architecture. The local community college offers programs in viticulture and enology to supply an educated workforce for the local wine industry.

When we left Walla Walla we drove south through Eastern Oregon, one of the most sparsely populated regions in the United States. The drive south through Pendleton and Burns offers lots of beautiful scenery. We stopped at Lake Abert, near Klamath Falls, and we were struck by the low water level. Evidence of the continued drought is everywhere in the western states.

After spending over a year in California hiding from the pandemic we decided to head north to Southern Oregon in mid-August to spend a few weeks in Grants Pass. But first we set aside a day to visit Lassen Volcanic National Park near Redding, CA, a park that we had enjoyed on a visit about ten years ago. As luck would have it, however, Lassen was closed to visitors due to the massive Dixie Fire, so instead of heading east to Lassen we headed west into the Trinity Alps. We began with a stop in Redding to walk across the Sundial Bridge. This beautiful pedestrian bridge across the Sacramento River has an unusual single-tower suspension design. As with everywhere in Northern California that week, the sky was very smoky from multiple wildfires. After lunch we drove west into the mountains, stopping first at the Shasta State Historic Park. The park contains the ruins of the gold rush town of Shasta. We then drove around the nearby mountains and saw lots of beautiful scenery, somewhat obscured by smoke. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.

We rented a house on the outskirts of Grants Pass, Oregon, on a small bluff overlooking the Rogue River. The house was spacious and comfortable, and it was very peaceful to see the river out our picture window every day. It was a perfect place to hide from the pandemic. The river is popular with tourists and every day we would see boaters, kayakers, and fishermen. Several times a day we also saw jet boats from Hellgate Jetboat Excursions, which departed from a dock in the center of Grants Pass about three miles upriver. We never rode in a jetboat ourselves but the folks in these fast boats looked like they were having a good time.

We enjoyed daily walks, as we do everywhere we go. There were beautiful walks around our semi-rural neighborhood, and we also enjoyed walking in Tussing Park near the center of Grants Pass. Tussing Park has a pedestrian bridge high over the Rogue River to connect the two shores. It was smoky for much of our time in Grants Pass so we especially enjoyed the rare clear days.

We took a day trip to Jedidiah Smith Redwoods State Park near Crescent City, about a two hour drive from Grants Pass and just across the California state line. This park is managed jointly by California State Parks and by the National Park Service as part of Redwood National Park. We enjoyed hiking in the beautiful, lush redwood forest and marveling at these huge, ancient trees.

 

We left Sacramento in May to spend a couple of weeks in Palo Alto watching a house and a little cat. We had signed up for TrustedHousesitters in 2019 and did two sits in Oregon just before Covid-19 struck, but this was our first sit since then. TrustedHousitters matches nomads like us with people who need someone to watch their homes and pets while they are away. We were in one of the most beautiful sections of Palo Alto and we enjoyed walks through the neighborhood and on the nearby Stanford University campus. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.

We left Palo Alto to drive south down the coast. We stopped for lunch at the old pier in Santa Cruz, then toured the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum.

We spent a couple of nights in Monterey and took the opportunity to visit Pinnacles National Park, in the hills south of Salinas. The park preserves a scene of ancient volcanic uplifting along the San Andreas Fault. We had passed the Pinnacles turnoff on Highway 101 many times but we had never visited the park. It was an interesting and worthwhile outing.

We continued southward on Highway 1, which provided many scenic views of the rugged Pacific coast. We drove through Big Sur south to Cambria.

We then spent a couple of weeks near Paso Robles, house sitting and cat sitting for our friends Sue and Leo while they went on vacation. Their house is quite remote, about a 45 minute drive west of Paso Robles, so we enjoyed the peace and quiet. Leo is a winemaker with a beautiful vineyard just downhill from the house.

We kept on going southward to spend a few days with our friend Betsy in Ojai. We continued our cat odyssey with Betsy’s two friendly cats. We were also able to visit family in Camarillo while we were in the area.

We returned to Sacramento to spend a couple of months before heading to southern Oregon in August. We are at a house that we stayed in last summer near the Carmichael neighborhood. It is very spacious and has a backyard pool that is perfect on the hot Sacramento summer days. We are not far from Oakland so we have been able to visit Andy and Heather several times.

 

We haven’t posted to our blog since December so this post will update our (somewhat limited) activities over the winter and spring. An accompanying post describes some traveling that we were able to resume in May. Our last post was on December 16, Andy’s birthday! We weren’t able to celebrate in person due to Covid-19 but we had a Zoom visit. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.

We spent the Christmas holidays at a guesthouse on the outskirts of Davis, described in our post last December.

We decorated the guesthouse for Christmas and made it look quite festive. We spent Christmas day alone but were able to visit with family and friends via Zoom.

We enjoyed walks around Davis and around our old neighborhood in nearby Woodland. Christmas decorations brightened our walks.

Our guesthouse was a short drive from UC Davis and we enjoyed walks around the UC Davis Arboretum and around the nearly deserted campus.

In January we moved to a cottage in the Arden Park district of Sacramento to spend the winter hiding from Covid-19. We had stayed at this cottage several times in the past and it is one of our favorites. The neighborhood is perfect for long walks and it is near the American River Parkway, another great walking destination.

We celebrated Charlie’s 70th birthday in April. We didn’t feel comfortable going out to a restaurant so we splurged on a beautiful prime rib roast that we cooked at home. Charlie got a fancy new meat thermometer for his birthday so the roast came out perfectly.

We got our Covid-19 vaccinations at the UC Davis Health System. The process was quick and efficient, kind of like a big assembly line.

We enjoyed occasional drives over to Woodland to walk around our old neighborhood. The central part of Woodland has homes dating back to the latter years of the 19th century.

One day in mid-winter we drove out to the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, about an hour north of the city. Migratory birds spend the winter at this preserved wetland and they are spectacular to see.

We haven’t added a new post in four months so it seemed time to provide an update. We haven’t been able to travel due to the Covid-19 pandemic so we have been staying in and around Sacramento, California, since late July. We don’t go out much where we would encounter other people indoors, just grocery shopping about once a week and trips to medical appointments. But outdoors we enjoy daily walks, a good opportunity to get out for a while and to keep up with our exercise. Otherwise our days are taken up by reading, cooking, watching TV, keeping up with the news, and (for Carrie) knitting. To deal with our wanderlust, we have discovered several YouTube channels that just walk around places where we have previously traveled, like Paris, Amsterdam, and Edinburgh. They are current videos and the deserted streets due to the pandemic are eerie.

We spent the late summer and early fall in a house near Carmichael, a semi-rural area in Sacramento’s eastern suburbs. The area was quiet and safe for our daily walks, and there were about two dozen wild turkeys that roamed the neighborhood. We would see them every day, sometimes pecking around in our front yard. It was also a short drive to the American River Parkway, a bikeway and pedestrian path that goes along the river for 32 miles to the east of Sacramento. The house that we rented had a backyard pool which was great on hot summer days. We were able to use the pool through mid-October. The photo gallery below shows a few sights we encountered around Sacramento. Click on the first photo in each block to view the slideshow.

We are spending the holiday season in a beautiful little guesthouse out in the country between Davis and Winters, California. There is farmland all around and it is very serene. We are a short drive from Woodland, where we lived for many years, and we have enjoyed walks around our old neighborhood. We had hoped to host Andy and his girlfriend for Thanksgiving and Christmas but instead we are heeding the recommendations of the health professionals and spending the holidays alone, taking full advantage of Zoom when we can. We visited Andy briefly outside his building on Thanksgiving morning but we came home and had our feast by ourselves. We cheated and had a Costco chicken instead of cooking a turkey, and it was delicious! Here’s wishing everyone a safe and happy holiday season.

We spent four and a half months in Santa Fe beginning with the start of the COVID isolation in March, and at the end of July we returned to California. We are going to stay around Sacramento for a few months to take care of some medical appointments and to see how the pandemic evolves. It’s not a good time to travel as we usually do. Our time in Santa Fe was mostly uneventful, as we avoided public places during the pandemic. We enjoyed long walks around beautiful Santa Fe on most days, and we saw the flowers and trees transform as spring became summer. Santa Fe is a desert city but many residents have beautiful gardens. Hollyhocks, especially, are prominent all over town. The photo galleries below show sights we encountered around Santa Fe. Click on the first photo in each block to view the slideshow.

Picturesque Doors and Gates of Santa Fe

Flowers, Flowers, Flowers!

Sights around Santa Fe

On the Road to California

We arrived in Santa Fe on March 14, at the beginning of the sheltering orders, and we have been here ever since.  We will stay here until it is reasonably safe to travel again, which we hope will be sometime this summer. Then we expect to return to California for a while and see what happens next. Our traveling lifestyle is on hold for now but we hope to resume when we can. In the meantime we both agree that if you have to be stranded somewhere, then Santa Fe is a pretty nice place to be.

Our main entertainment is taking long walks every day. Santa Fe is a beautiful and interesting city, and the weather has been great, so walking around town is a pleasure. The tourists are gone so the streets are largely deserted, which is a little bit eerie but also makes social distancing easy. You can see photos of some of our walks in the galleries below.

Our daily life has not been significantly affected by the pandemic. Charlie goes grocery shopping (with a mask, required in New Mexico) once a week and that’s about the extent of our interaction with the public. Charlie has always enjoyed cooking and we rarely went out to eat even before the pandemic, so the closure of sit-down restaurants hasn’t been an issue for us. We order take-out about once a week, mainly to support the local restaurants during these tough economic times.

We are staying in a friend’s condo about a half mile from the old central plaza. It is in a compound of about two dozen condos. The architecture is pueblo-style and the driveway is gravel, so it has the feel of old Santa Fe. The photo gallery below shows a few glimpses of our condo complex, including an April snowstorm! Click on the first photo in each block to view the slideshow.

We often enjoy walks in the downtown area and the adjacent Railyard District, a former industrial area now reconfigured with shops and galleries. The State Capitol and the state government complex are an easy walk from our condo and from the central plaza, so we often walk through the landscaped grounds.

Canyon Road is another favorite walking destination, about a mile from our condo. Canyon Road is home to many of Santa Fe’s prominent art galleries, many with outdoor gardens and sculptures. The galleries have been closed but it is fun to walk down the mostly deserted street and view the art and architecture.

Another favorite walk is along the Old Santa Fe Trail from Museum Hill back to our condo. This walk features sweeping views of the distant mountains as well as many beautiful homes along the way. Adjacent to Museum Hill is a set of outdoor sculptures commemorating the migrants who traveled along the Old Santa Fe Trail in conestoga wagons. The museums have been closed due to the pandemic, but we have visited them during previous trips to Santa Fe.

About twice a week we like to drive out to Eldorado for our afternoon walk, about 12 miles southeast of Santa Fe. Eldorado is a community of pueblo-style single family homes on large lots (around two acres) so it is not as congested as Santa Fe. We rented a house in Eldorado for two months in the winter of 2018 and we always enjoyed our walks there. The streets are wide and safe for walking and there is a system of walkways/bikeways. There are sweeping views of the distant mountains in almost any direction.

 

Aside from all the walking, Carrie had a special knitting project during the pandemic quarantine. She follows a couple of knitting designers in Norway named Arne and Carlos and they hosted a “Mystery Knitalong” to keep people entertained while shut in. They posted a video each day with instructions for knitting a square for what would eventually become a pillow. Arne and Carlos are funny and entertaining. Even Charlie enjoyed their videos, and he’s not a knitter.

First, for those who are wondering, we are safely settled in a friend’s condo in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We are both healthy and hope to stay that way. We avoid crowds and our main activity is taking long walks around Santa Fe, a unique and historical city. We are only about a half mile from the old plaza so there are many interesting places to walk just outside our door. There are few tourists left in town so social distancing is easy. We hope all of our friends and family are healthy, as well.

Carrie received a yarn Advent Calendar last year, consisting of 24 mini-skeins of yarn, one to be revealed each day before Christmas. In addition to knitting a large shawl, she is using bits of leftover yarn for a mystery knit-along hosted by two Norwegian designers who are quarantined for 14 days in their home in the Norwegian mountains after disembarking from a cruise last week. A pattern for a patch is released every weekday for 2 weeks, with the final project revealed at the end. Mixing unusual colors into unfamiliar patterns is providing new and interesting combinations that Carrie wouldn’t have considered before. The silver lining of self isolation?

Before we came to Santa Fe we spent two weeks in Albuquerque, house sitting and cat sitting for friends. We had sat for them before and Mai-Mai seemed glad to see us. Rocio, more reserved and more cat-like, seemed to wish we would go away most of the time. We enjoyed revisiting some of our favorite walking paths along the Rio Grande, including the Bachechi Open Space.

One day while in Albuquerque we drove about 100 miles south to the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, along the Rio Grande just south of Socorro. Bosque del Apache is well-known in the Southwest for its abundance of migratory birds. Mid-winter is the peak bird season so we were a little late for the most spectacular sightings, but we did see many birds and we enjoyed the day. On the way we stopped for lunch at the Buckhorn Tavern in San Antonio, NM, well-known for their green chile cheeseburgers, a New Mexico specialty.