Our Trip to Fort Bragg

Ricardo and I just took a trip to Fort Bragg for my Birthday. It is a little odd, the town is "Fort Bragg" but the actual fort the Russians built and maintained for years is called "Fort Ross." Why the discrepancy? Perhaps we'll never know.

It is a cute town though, with lots of fun things to do. You may not have heard of it it is so tiny. It is just north of Mendocino, the artsy touristy town that gets more visitors, and about three hours North of San Francisco. (Is that right Ricardo? I forget.)

Here are my favorite pictures. There are four posts of pictures because it seems blogger has a limit it can handle per post. Enjoy!



My artsy lighthouse picture. This is the Fresnel lens(pronounced "Frennel" because it is a French man's name) used to focus and amplify the oil lamp used to light the lighthouse beacon.



Ricardo on a point of land taking a picture of the Pacific. The first day was a little overcast with stormy waves. My Birthday day though was gorgeous with sun and blue sky. So nice.

I seemed during the trip to have a little equilibrium problem. Most of my distance pictures feature a tilted horizon. I wasn't drunk, I swear! :-)



The angry sea that first day.

Second set::Train

Ricardo set up this delightful excursion. We took a train ride through the woods, by a river, to a "mining camp" under the redwoods. It was beautiful and I do like trains. The only bad thing was that it was supposed to take around three hours round trip and it took more like six. We had been planning to have lunch when we got off our morning train ride so we were hungry at the end. I still had fun though.



Our locomotive. It was a steam locomotive, very fun.



On the train, chugging through the woods by the river. We had someone else take this picture so you could see the train car.



Us by the train up in the pretend mining camp. Someone else took this one too so you can see the train. Y'know, I don't think we took one picture of ourselves. Weird. :-)

Third bunch o' Pictures

These take us to the beach at noon, then to the lighthouse that evening, through to the botanical gardens the next day.



dear Ricardo staring off into the ocean. This was a lovely beach, actually. It had a large river coming to meet the ocean that was warm and shallow and lots of people swam in it. And the actual beach/ocean part featured clean warm sand and good views of amazing waves. That was fun. We were heading to glass beach, though, so we didn't stay really long. Glass Beach is the site of the old dump that closed one or two hundred years ago. All the trash is gone, but the glass bottles have gotten broken and tumbled in the sand and water until they are small and smooth. The ground is covered with glass fragments. People collect them, even though you're not supposed to. Blue glass is very rare. Mainly white, green and amber glass.



This is my most amazing picture. It is one of the light houses, I think Point Cabrillo, at sunset. If you look closely you'll see I caught the flash of the lighthouse and a plane going by on the left. Isn't that cool!?!



A beautiful and fancy fuschia in the botanical gardens.



Ricardo taking some amazing pictures of the flowers in the botanical garden.



A field of sunspot in the gardens.