Hello again! I know, it’s been a very long time since I wrote in my blog. In the spring, during the lock downs, I thought I might return to posting, but I chose to create a wonderful garden instead. It took up most of my time and was a very rewarding experience. We just ate the last (frozen) tomato soup and also finished the pickles I made from the abundance of tomatoes and cucumbers.
Anyway, in addition to the gardening I also walked and hiked a lot during 2020; sometimes by myself, sometimes with a friend or my husband, and I also hiked a lot with the Irvine Ranch Conservancy as a volunteer (and later as a docent) while we could still do it. At this moment Orange County is in a partial lock down, and we can only use public trails, not the IRC ones.

On the last day of 2020, my friend and I visited one of the Aliso and Wood Canyons Wilderness Park Trails (map).

We took a 5.5 mile hike on Wood Canyon Trail and Wood Creek Trail. We started the hike at Canyon Vistas Road. I was excited about this walk, because my friend saw a bobcat and a coyote on her walk here a few days back, and I hoped to see them as well.

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In my previous post I mentioned that we spent a few days in Las Vegas on a family trip. I had recently purchased a small, mirrorless camera for taking pictures during my travels and my hikes (which I will talk about later). I took hundreds of pictures during the drive to Las Vegas and in the city. I found it very easy to use, and very light to carry it around. (It’s a Panasonic Lumix GX85.)

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A lot of things have happened in the past few months. I want to share some of those things with you in my future posts, and I decided to start with my latest adventures.

For the Thanksgiving holiday my family drove to Las Vegas and spent a few days there. It was my first visit to this city, and to tell you the truth, it wasn’t my most favorite place. But I truly enjoyed the drive back home! 🙂 Southern California got hit by a storm, which caused very heavy rains in certain areas, and snow in others. We were lucky not to be in the storm, but we did see the aftermath of it while heading back from Nevada to California. Something that helped me create the following pictures was a wonderful traffic jam on the highway. Normally I wouldn’t consider a traffic jam wonderful, but since I was a passenger and I had my camera in my hands, I had a great time shooting the unusual scenery from the slow-moving car.

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About six or seven years ago, while visiting my birth country, Hungary, I started working on a photo thematic. I loved walking on the old streets of the Castle District in Budapest, and I was (and still am) amazed by the gorgeous – mostly antique- door handles many of the doors have there. In addition to finding more ornate and wonderfully unique handles in Budapest, I also captured some in Eger, KÅ‘szeg, and in some other cities. I created some final photos, printed and shared them with a mentor of mine. He wasn’t very impressed…

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The pictures in this post were taken during the summer when I was visiting my family in Hungary. This was the second time I visited the “Fűvészkert”, an arboretum in Budapest. It’s a wonderful place for plant and flower lovers, with or without a camera. I spent a few hours walking around and capturing flowers with three of my Lensbaby lenses: the Twist 60, the Sol 45 and the Velvet 56. I hope you’ll enjoy the photos of the flora of the arboretum as much as I enjoyed seeing them in live.

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