Humming in California

Hmmm!

Here's Anna's Hummingbird! We were quite surprised to see one of these buzzing around on a cold winter's morning in Vancouver - in recent years it 's been found that they don't fly south for winter anymore and one reason that's proposed for this is that they survive on garden feeders. We saw more of these humming around down in California on a series of feeders under the eaves of a seaside bungalow as per the picture below - (the close up on the right is not my snap!) Neat fact of the day - a hummingbird's heart beats over 1000 times per minute!

I took this one!

Gotta stay out of his way!

And so to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Only it's not golden it's a rusty red colour - and you should have been able to see it behind my head here except it was another foggy morning. In the other direction is the island of Alcatraz - as I finished the Crissy Field parkrun I could hear someone coming up fast behind me - I only noticed later that he had an Alcatraz t-shirt on - was he on the run? The escaped prisoner pushed me to my best time for a year 20:47 which took the over 65 record by over a minute. Vicky took it bit more steadily for 34:19.

Nelson - here's the rest of your columns!

Impressions of San Francisco are bound to vary according to where you stay and what you see. We found a wonderful Inn in the Presidio area called the Monte Cristo. In the US 'Inns' are a good idea - they tend to be smaller than hotels, often old and very individual. They usually have excellent breakfasts and that's abut the extent of the catering except that here, the South African cook Andre, makes some excellent afternoon snacks such as cookies and chocolate fudge. The Presidio itself is the top left hand corner of the San Franscisco peninsula - it's a big rambling park with some monumental buildings just outside - these were left over from the Pan American Fair of 1914 and were one of the most impressive sights we saw. Not much else caught our imagination though, we think that in some ways this city is a little overrated - we walked down to the Haight Ashbury district where hippiedom took off, it's a bit tacky now and the story about much of the rest about San Francisco is that it's frighteningly expensive!

Gosh she gets in all the best shots!

However when the fog lifts the bridge is pretty impressive - just to prove the fog did lift here it is - it's that reddish structure far away in the background. This was taken close to where the parkrun took place - Crissy Field is the site of an old US Army airport and the actual run itself is flat all the way round. However it's on a gravel track which means that times are not as quick as they might be (well I think I should have been quicker!) On the day things must have looked very confusing to passers-by as there was a Halloween run at the same time with hundreds of people dressed in costume running in the opposite direction to us at anything between a quickish gallop to a shuffle.