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.

Read More

A couple of months ago I signed up for a 6 hour long truck tour in the mountains right behind us. It’s an area that is not open to the public, but the Irvine Ranch Conservancy organizes programs there that you can attend. I was very excited about this truck tour, but unfortunately it had to be cancelled due to rainy weather. Luckily, I was able to sign up for a different day for a 4-hour long tour on June 8th.

The group met Donna, our driver, and the other 4 volunteers at the Augustine Staging area, where we started our trip on this truck:

Read More

I had it in my calendar weeks ago: low-tide coinciding with sunrise on Tuesday, May 21. I picked a location and arrived to Shaw’s Cove just before 5:30am. I felt very lucky, because there were a few clouds in the sky, and the barely waning Moon was also setting. (I had chosen this location because of the Moon; I used an app called TPE that helped me pinpoint a good spot.)

My goal was to take landscape pictures as well as hopefully find some neat low-tide animals. Here are some of the earlier landscapes:

Read More

On Saturday my husband and I enjoyed another wonderful hike. We only had to drive 5 minutes to the trail head, and after about an hour or so hike we reached a lookout point from where we were presented with the above view. This is called The Sink – I believe this one is the West Sink. We didn’t have time to hike another mile to see the East Sink, but we’ll try to do that next time. These are natural sandstone formations, which are sometimes referred to as Orange County’s miniature Grand Canyon. Here are a few images from our hike.

Read More