Spring in the San Francisco Bay Area

I discovered the wonderful world of blogging a few months back and am addicted to it. Through my blog, I met (virtually) many writers from different parts of the world with different styles. We all have many common interests one of which is to share small parts of our lives with others.

Bindu, of Transient Lives tagged me to do the meme of sixes. She has a beautiful blog, where she writes about a variety of topics. Her writing is very sweet, sensitive and almost poetic. Do visit her blog. She is currently blogging about her trip to Argentina.

This is the first time I have been tagged, so here I am, sincerely (almost) following the rules.

• Pick the 6th picture in the 6th picture folder
• Write the story behind it, and
• Pass it on to 6 other people.

Well....the sixth picture in my sixth folder turned out be that of the turtle from my recent Hawaii post. Obviously, I didn't want to repeat, so was going to cheat, by picking a really good picture and pretending that it was the one. Then I remembered that I had an external hard drive with lots of old pictures and looked for the 6th picture in the 6th folder and found this picture of a cactus-like wildflower. It was from a hike we did in spring of 2004. Seeing the picture brought back a lot of memories about the beautiful bay area and the good old times we had there. I want to thank Bindu for the tag because I would never have written this post if not for the tag.



Bay area has a very short spring - maybe a month or two at the most. This is the time when the hills come alive with lush greenery and a variety of wildflowers....almost Switzerland-like. A month later, we are left with brown hills that look like giant potatoes. For those that live in Mumbai, it is like seeing Lonavla in monsoons and then in Summer.
Spring is the time when we used to dust off our hiking shoes and take a vow to spend more time outdoors. The easiest way of doing that would be to wake up early on a weekend and go to a regional park in our backyard. These are pictures from hikes in Garin Regional Park and the Sunol Wilderness Regional parks. 15 minutes drive from where we lived, there parks were beautiful in Spring. Early morning was the best time to hike here because of the lack of shade.



We would wake up early, drive to Noah's Bagels, order our usuals - Jalapeno bagel or a blueberry bagel with cream cheese and a nice cup of steaming medium roast coffee. I miss bagels in India (sigh!). It is funny how you miss little things that you didn't pay too much attention to, when you had them. I miss going to a diner for Sunday brunch. My favorite order at IHOP was french style crepes with orange marmalade and a side of eggs.

The picture below shows Babu, Aru, Sirisha, Sharma and me stretching before the hike. The trails were decently marked and we would always find our way around....except this one time when Babu and I were lost and ended up hiking for a couple of hours more than what we had planned. We made up for the extra calories burnt by eating the world's best Chicken tikka masala at Shalimar!









I love this picture of the lone tree with the mist rolling in.






So, all you guys out there, enjoy your spring this year, go on beautiful hikes, eat a bagel for me and remember the good times we had.

I would like to pass on this tag to a few people whose blogs I started following recently:

• Celine of Fugue
• Priyank of Final Transit
• Kalyan of Travellers Diary
• Ravi of Lone Backpackker
• Lakshmi of Indian Backpakker
  
• Dhiren of Amateur Clicker

Hope you pick it up.