John & Anne Wiley

2011/10/25

Immigrants On Top

Filed under: Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,Nature,People,Random,Relationships,SB Region — John @ 08:14

Both pix I chose for today’s post seem to have immigrants on top. First the church in the upper Montecito Village that looks like it has walls three feet thick. In this pic you can see they’re pretty much standard walls, but the recessed windows give the effect of a centuries old adobe with massive walls.

7367 Walls & Roof

7367 Walls & Roof

If you click to see the larger version you can make out the worker on the roof who’s wearing a hat of the sort favored by local migrant workers. Today’s other pic strikes me like an impression of Disneyland. Maybe the “colonial” look, or the tidy and symmetrical landscaping, or the color scheme.

7373 Fantasyland

7373 Fantasyland

If you click this one to see the larger version, you can make out another migrant worker at the top doing something with his pickup truck. After presumably working in or around this manse, he’s turned attention to the aging vehicle that takes him to a very different part of town.

There’s something about flying over scenes like these, noticing something, snapping a pic, and then looking at the full-size version days later. Often there’s something I hadn’t noticed, or couldn’t even see from the air, that explains what caught my eye or moved me to snap. Sometimes there’s some detail more interesting than the overall scene, that was invisible from the air (like the two people in these pix). Now and then there will be a combination of overview and detail that adds greatly to my enjoyment, and an example is this second pic. I love the impression and feel evoked by the mansion and estate, and the contrast provided by imagining a guy who helped create and maintain that opulence but can’t afford a reliable work truck. Guess I’m officially a Liberal, whatever that means. 🙂

I’m going to toss in one more pic I like from that flight, of a shirtless guy in a boat looking at the seals on the buoy just outside the Santa Barbara harbor. Does this (or the other two) evoke anything for you?

7385 Buoy Toy

7385 Buoy Toy

2011/10/23

To Slo

Filed under: Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,Nature,People,Random,SB Region — John @ 17:30

One of the first things you learn about flying is how to fly slow, and what happens if you fly too slow. So tho too slow can be bad, a little slow can be quite good. But what happens when you fly a little slow to SLO? If you’re flying along the coast from the North, you see stuff like this beautiful old bridge on the Pacific Coast Highway.

7228 PCH Bridge

7228 PCH Bridge

When you reach Morro Bay you can see from Morro Rock along the string of her sister peaks to SLO.

7316 Mo to SLO

7316 Mo to SLO

San Luis Obispo has some slow and easy qualities, so its initials SLO seem to fit except when the students from Cal Poly bring their energy to the streets. With the beaches under a sleepy blanket, we decided to turn inland the few miles and pass closer to SLO. The gentle turn gave us a different glimpse of Morro Bay through an opening in the cloud.

7323 Morro Bay Shroud

7323 Morro Bay Shroud

Then we got a clearer view of the sister peaks with Cal Poly and SLO in the distance.

7332 Sisters to SLO

7332 Sisters to SLO

So flying the good kind of slow can bring a good kind of glow as Tripp’s warm hum and stout wings roll this beautiful planet beneath our wide eyes.

2011/10/22

To Sur w/Love

Filed under: Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Nature,People,Random,SB Region — John @ 08:45

Perusing more pix from our flight home along Big Sur from San Jose I picked out three more to share. First up is the Nepenthe hood. When we stop in there on our drives along this scenic coast, it seems to be just a few rustic commercial buildings and I’ve wondered how far people drive to their jobs in the shops and eateries there. Well, some might actually walk judging by this pic.

7174 Nepenthe Hood

7174 Nepenthe Hood

This neighborhood includes an extended area with lots of homes you just don’t see from the road. Every ridge line is dotted with them, and more are probably nestled in the treed valleys too. Nepenthe itself is on the small peak just left of the straight stretch of road visible in the upper middle of the pic. Maybe there’s a trail down the steep creek bed that opens onto the beach. At the upper right of the green meadow above the beach you can make out the area of this next pic. Looks to me like some sort of open air retreat center, but maybe it’s just a really cool ranch house.

7177 Retreat Ranch?

7177 Retreat Ranch?

We’ve had many contacts with people involved in the Esalen community for decades, but only driven in part way one time. So it was difficult to spot from the air until I looked it up on a gMaps satellite view. This pic makes me want to go and explore it more. Maybe even make a workshop proposal and spend some time there.

7215 Esalen

7215 Esalen

As with Nepenthe, there’s a relatively big hidden community around it, including across the creek outlet at the bottom-left of the pic. I’ve yet to discover an airport on the Big Sur coast, but it wouldn’t help much anyway given that the weather there is so often unsuited to our kind of flying. We’ve flown to Monterey and taken the inexpensive bus, but it turns around before Esalen. We could also fly to SLO or Paso and rent a car, but that only shaves 1.5 hours off the drive time from home and so far we haven’t done it. Looking at these pix sure has me thinking about it again tho.

2011/10/20

More Home

Filed under: Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,People,Random,Relationships,SB Region — John @ 03:26

We’re feeling more Home than usual tonight. We flew to San Diego to bring Dad back for a visit, and our place feels so filled with Family! Having been a pilot in WWII he of course loves to fly, so that adds to our fun too. There were low clouds along the coast, so we detoured via El Monte rather than our usual route along the coast. That coupled with smog, higher than usual altitude and afternoon sun made it so hazy I didn’t snap a single pic! I do have one to share of our departure past the Stevens Bridge, which as you may recall is our favored driving route into town because when crossing we vote on the best view (mountains or coast, and mountains usually win). We enjoy looking down at the pathetic view it offers when flying past like this, because from Tripp the view is almost always spectacular in every direction.

7392 Leaving Home

7392 Leaving Home

So anyway, here’s a glance toward the bridge where the two cars currently on the span are probably oblivious to our passing. I’m guessing that because we often pull over to let the traffic go by before crossing the bridge just below the speed limit. I wonder if anyone else actually takes the time to enjoy those views from the bridge, because most seem quite intent on getting somewhere. Maybe it’s unusual how thoroughly we enjoy our beautiful Home.

2011/10/19

Groups

Filed under: Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,Nature,People,Random,Relationships,SB Region — John @ 06:20

I chose three more pix from our SJ->SB flight for posting, and got curious what theme connects them. Maybe you’ll see something different, but what I see in common is groups. First the groups of people who jump out of perfectly good airplanes.

7079 Skydivers

7079 Skydivers

Rather than a leisurely descent to take in the sights after their free fall, these two seemed to be in a hurry to get down as they corkscrewed toward the beach to more quickly lose altitude. Guess the fun part for them is the fall. Next is a shot that includes groups of people enjoying the beach at Big Sur, some perhaps unaware of how dramatic the seaward side of those rocks are.

7149 Rugged Rocks

7149 Rugged Rocks

Last up is the groups of gulls gathered near the falls at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park as if they’re somehow fascinated by the sight or sound. Maybe it provides food or fresh water for them?

7194 Gulls Just Wanna Have Fun

7194 Gulls Just Wanna Have Fun

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