John & Anne Wiley

2011/10/28

Itchy Feathers

Filed under: Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,People,Random,SB Region — John @ 09:41

When I don’t fly for a while, a feeling arises that I call “itchy feathers.” After about a week on the ground, this sensation grows in strength and pops into my awareness more with each day I don’t fly. It’s much worse on when I look out the window in the morning and see good flying weather. I had a major itchy attack this morning. Since it wasn’t convenient to fly due to things we needed to do around town, I got some relief from driving to/from town via “our” Stevens Park bridge.

7393 Stevens Bridge

7393 Stevens Bridge

The mountains won today’s vote both times, even though the islands were relatively clear. I posted a version of this next pic on Edhat hoping one of the local history experts there could tell me more about it.

7394 Palm Curve

7394 Palm Curve

Who planted the palms along this street near the bridge, and why? Maybe at some point there was a grand estate at the end of the palm-lined avenue? Maybe some housing development with a mid-east theme?

A little further along we got a panoramic view of the Tea Fire disaster. A bonfire at the iconic abandoned tea gardens (I’ve marked it with a white circle at the upper right) got away from the kids who’d built it.

7396 Tea Fire Footprint

7396 Tea Fire Footprint

It had been kicked up by “sundowner” wind and raced up, down, and along the mountain destroying many buildings. The stadium and buildings of Westmont College at the lower right were threatened, and with no time to escape by road people had to shelter in place. Many buildings still haven’t been replaced, and as you can see the mountains have a long way to re-grow their ground cover.

I don’t know if it’s a mansion or some sort of commercial building, but this last pic doesn’t seem to be part of the Westmont campus.

7397 Palm Estate

7397 Palm Estate

It has lots of beautiful palm trees like the curve at the top, but this is several miles West so surely not part of the same development or road.

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.

2011/10/21

Flashback

Filed under: Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,People,Random,Relationships — John @ 07:23

I’m in a sentimental mood, remembering past family times as I look at more pix from our flight from San Diego family to San Jose family. We passed over Lake Nacimiento on the way, and I remembered trying to drive a car up a dirt path I’d taken down to the shore.

6908 Lake Holiday

6908 Lake Holiday

It was on the left bank at the bottom, and my Dad was sitting and watching from the right bank. The episode ended with the car’s clutch burned out and a kind 4wd owner towing it up. Seems like another lifetime, that holiday weekend at the lake only a couple of decades ago.

As sunset approached we passed the airport at Hollister where there’s this family fun farm with pumpkin patch, go cart track, and other attractions including a giant maze.

6919 Fly-In Memories

6919 Fly-In Memories

Most families probably drive there, but there must be some who fly in and walk over to the farm. Regardless of how they arrive, some of those who go will be remembering their family time and how they thought it would go on forever.

It’s always interesting to see another aircraft when we’re flying, because most of the time they’re only distant dots. So when ATC pointed this helicopter and Tripp out to each other near Morgan Hill, I had to snap it. Having just passed another family fun pumpkin patch place, it looked like a flying pumpkin flying

6949 Flying Pumpkin

6949 Flying Pumpkin

along the old Monterey Highway we drove when I was a small child in the back seat watching telephone wires seeming to sweep rhythmically up and down as we droned past. One night I heard the whistle of a steam train, and all those sensations are now mingled into this flashback that will soon be forgotten forever. How long before even our most vivid recent and delicious flying memories fade into darkness?

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