Pictures of the Kitties

Mom, you'll like this post. I was taking a trip down memory lane looking at old pictures of the kitties and thought I should share. We got them when they were 10 weeks old, they were so small! I took plenty of pictures of them, this is a collection of some of my favorites.

These must have been taken within the first week of us getting them, judging by their size.

I snapped this picture of Cleo looking adorable when she was a little bit bigger, but still a kitten.

This was when we moved into our old apartment, when we first arrived in San Francisco from LA. It didn't have any furniture yet, and the kitties were bored without anything to climb on.

This was still in the old apartment. Here you can see how much bigger they got, they don't curl up anymore when they lie down.

And these next ones were taken this past year in our current apartment.

I was taking some pictures of my sketches this morning when Cleo sat right down on them as if to say "take pictures of me instead"

She's so happy here, basking in the sun.

And one last one of Alex.

Skyline Bike Ride

Greg and I did another long and beautiful bike ride last weekend, we went from our apartment to LinkedIn in Mountain View. The weather has been so nice lately, we've been trying to take advantage of it. The route was called Skyline because that is the name of a major road it uses. This ride was about 55 miles from our apartment to the destination with a good amount of hills. Some people bike this path to work in the mornings as their commute! It wasn't as intense as Mount Tam, but after that bike ride anything seemed easy. Part of this route was along the west coast instead of the east coast, so we had some nice views of the Pacific Ocean as opposed to the bay. Here's a map of the route we took along with its elevation profile.

We stopped when we got to the ocean to take some pictures. This was right near the fault that caused the huge earthquake in San Francisco in 1906.

Here you can see the land slowly falling into itself, forming a cliff.

We stopped again to take pictures by the San Andreas Lake, which is north of Foster City on the map.

This road was entirely closed off from cars for bikers on Sundays, so we had both lanes to ourselves. There are a few streets around San Francisco that do that, it was a good day to plan the trip.

And sometime around 80% of the way through, Greg's phone died, and took our map along with it. This wasn't a simple route, so we had to go the rest of the way by a combination of memory and asking fellow bikers for directions. But we made it to LinkedIn alright and got to see yet another pretty face of California.

Mount Tamalpais

For the July 4th holiday, Greg and I decided to bike up Mount Tam. Mount Tam is a mountain peak not too far from the city, and it's a popular biking destination for Bay area bikers. We heard good things about it, so we decided to try it on our day off. Little did we know what we were in for. It was roughly 34 miles from our apartment to get to the top, and the peak was at en elevation of 2571 feet with a gain of 6186 feet. It took us over 4 hours to get to the top (including breaks), and about 3 of those hours were spent just biking up hill. Can you imagine biking up hill for 3 hours? On top of that the road was narrow with a small shoulder, and on some parts there was a cliff on one side. It was quite the bike trip. It wasn't the distance so much as the climbing that got to me. We've done longer bike trips than this, but never to that elevation. I almost didn't make it (a Clif bar saved me), but Greg had no complaints, and he was carrying a backpack with 2 heavy Kryptonite U-locks in it. At the top the views were spectacular. We could see a good part of the city and California mountains.

I found this picture online of the mountain to give you an idea of the scale. We went to the very top.

These are some pictures I took along the way.

Here's Greg standing with the bikes. This was about 75% of the way up to the top.

This was about 80% of the way up, we stopped here to have a snack. We were above the fog of the city.

Like sitting on top of the world.

And this was the view at the very top. The fog covered most of the city, but you can see a bit of it through the trees.

Greg had me point at the small portion of city.

And then we stopped at a few places to take pictures on the way down.

There's a bit more city in this picture, and you can see the bay in the distance.

Some mountains and fog.

It was a very exhausting trip for me, but that's part of what made it feel so rewarding to complete. I got to really know my limits. We drove through this road once before and it's an entirely different experience biking it. We really felt like we were a part of it.

I hope you guys had a great holiday as well!