Tag: Christmas

Living at Mount Hermon

As the year draws to a close, we find ourselves living in Mount Hermon while our house in Albany undergoes remodeling. Our adventure here begins on December 1st, when we drove our rental U-Haul truck up the driveway at #6 Pine Avenue in Mount Hermon.

Thanks to our daughter, Amy, we found a very cute house to rent for our stay here, which will keep us comfortable through the end of January when we anticipate moving back to Albany.

Originally, we were going to stay through December with the idea that we would take the pop-up camper on a road trip for part of January. On December 14 through, I broke my left wrist, so I no driving and thus no road trip. We could do worse than have such a comfortable place to stay in such a beautiful location here in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

We’ve been coming to Mount Hermon for over 40 years for church retreats, so we have some familiarity with the place. And our daughter and family live here as well. We are a 5-minute walk from our grandson.

On December 8th Amy hosted a gingerbread party and we were happy to participate. Cutting out dough shapes, gluing them together and decorating the resulting houses with frosting and candy.

On December 24th our son Aaron arrived with his family. We were blessed with having our whole family together for Christmas with both of our kids, our two grandkids and our son-in-law’s parents as well.

With family together we enjoyed hiking through the majestic redwoods, up to the cross on the top of the mountain and exploring the Bonny Doon Ecological Preserve.

And when the rain prevailed, we contented ourselves with putting together jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles have been a holiday tradition in my family since I was a kid. More photos are available in an online gallery.

Point Reyes Retreat

Christmas was an opportunity to gather together as family. We had our two kids, their spouses, two grandkids and two dogs. On Christmas day we opened gifts and feasted on turkey and roast beef. After spending a day exploring local attractions including the Oakland Zoo, we piled into two cars and drove to Inverness, a 45-mile drive, where we had reserved a vacation rental for the better part of the week.

One morning I got up early to go photograph the tree tunnel. This is a feature that has been on my list to explore for some time. Not your typical tourist attraction, it’s simply a road lined with Monterey cypress trees planted in the 1930s. It caught my attention after seeing photos posted on Instagram.

It was a foggy morning, and I was hoping that the fog would create a sense of mystery. My plan was to arrive during the blue hour and to be done when the sun came up. The foggy mood I was anticipating didn’t happen but getting an early start did pay off. When the sun came up the light added drama that I was not anticipating. It turns out the tunnel is oriented almost east-west, so the morning sun creates an interesting effect. This image is available as a fine art photo in my art store at store.treve.com.

No visit to Tomales Bay is complete without a visit to the Bovine Bakery, a favorite haunt for pastries and coffee. Then we had a day with a break in the rainy weather and we headed to Limatour Beach, one of the few beaches in the Point Reyes National Recreation Area that is dog friendly.

And no family adventure is complete without grandma reading stories in front of a warm fire. On our last morning together, we piled into two cars to brave the fog and stormy weather to drive out to the lighthouse. You can see the car ahead with half of our crew is nearly lost in the fog. It was a blustery walk from the parking lot to the viewing platform. The lighthouse was lost in the fog, so we created our own Point Reyes Light with an iPhone. More photos are available in an online gallery.

Joy to the World

Merced River in Winter. Yosemite National Park.

It’s December 24 as I write this. Christmas Eve. Our adventures are keeping us close to home for the time being. Between sneezing, coughing and popping cold pills we’re both feeling a bit under the weather. We’re laying low and anticipating the joy of Christmas; awakening to the celebration of a light in the world, the birth of Jesus. So as the new day dawns may the light shine on you and bring you peace and joy, regardless of what traditions you follow.

Christmas in the Alabama Hills

Truck campers in the Alabama Hills at dusk.
Sunrise on Christmas Day. Alabama Hills
Truck campers in the Alabama Hills. Christmas morning.
Treve, Joann and Carson at camp in the Alabama Hills. Breakfast of Quiche cooking in the Diutch Oven.
Quiche on the Dutch Oven.

Christmas eve found us in the Eastern Sierra setting up camp in the Alabama Hills. There were four of us and two campers. Our son Aaron and his wife Serena joined us for the overnight camping trip, about 45 minutes south of their place in Big Pine. Part of our mission was to see if we could create a photo of our two campers worthy for Truck Camper Magazine’s calendar. It will remain to be seen if our photos make it into the calendar but we had fun scouting a location, setting up camp and creating photos. The location we picked had a view of the crest of the Sierra’s with the peak of Mount Whitney visible to the west and an outcropping of granite boulders to the east, hiding some of the other campers in the area.

The Alabama Hills is a recreation area managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Open to camping year round. Dog friendly and free of charge. There are no facilities though, so bring your own water.  Inclined to be hot in summer, we had mild winter temperatures, with the thermometer recording a low of 39 degrees overnight.

We’ve recently discovered Dutch Oven cooking and we put our oven to use cooking a savory Christmas eve dinner of chicken and rice. with chunks of chicken breast wrapped in thinly sliced ham and bacon. Breakfast was quiche with ham left over from an early Christmas dinner a couple of days earlier when our daughter and her husband rendezvoused with us on their way to Utah.