We spent most of today at the Presidio; we hadn’t been there for a long time, and it was a good day to go there. We found parking on the Main Post right away, always a good sign on a Sunday!

We walked from the Main Post (actually, the Tunnel Tops, which were new since the last time we’d been to the Presidio) to Fort Point, the Golden Gate Bridge, and back, taking the lower part of the Presidio Promenade trail on our way out and the upper route on the way back.

The hike got off to a good start when Diane saw this hummingbird.

Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge are always photo standouts.

I didn’t notice that these planes were painted different colors until I looked at my photo!

Here’s a Brewer’s Blackbird at Crissy Field.

We’d almost reached Fort Point when I took this picture.

We spent more than an hour exploring Fort Point. I liked the Cook’s Creed, though I don’t always plan to follow it.

After we left Fort Point, we saw some paragliders coming in for a landing near Fort Mason.

We took a break on our way to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Google Maps says I took this next photo at the “Golden Gate Postcard Viewpoint”.

We left the bridge area around 4pm and saw a red-tailed hawk just hovering in the sky; it hardly moved for minutes on end.

One more postcard shot – the Golden Gate Bridge at the Golden Hour.

The National Cemetery reminded us of why the Presidio was there.

And we finally saw why they call the area we started from “Tunnel Tops”.

Getting out of San Francisco was very slow; I guess we should have left earlier, but I’m glad we didn’t!

Jeff had the day off, so we decided to go to Santa Cruz to see the monarch butterflies at Natural Bridges State Park. There were, however, a few tasks I had to get out of the way before we could leave.

I was going to take the Prius to the mechanic, but the Check Engine light didn’t come on when I started the car this morning. There’s a small possibility that the light came on last night because I hadn’t tightened the gas cap enough when I filled the tank, so I decided to wait and see what happens over the weekend.

That gave me enough time to make pretzels – which, of course, took longer than I expected. As usual. It would have been a little quicker if I hadn’t run out of bread flour; fortunately, I had plenty of King Arthur All Purpose Flour with an 11.7% gluten level, which was high enough to work. I put the pretzels in the refrigerator to cool just after lunch, and we were in Santa Cruz at 2pm.

We parked at the Swift Street Courtyard and visited 11th Hour Coffee for a warm drink before walking to Natural Bridges. We usually walk down to West Cliff Drive, then over to the park, but Google Maps suggested a shortcut which took us down Delaware Avenue to the northern entrance to the park, just a few feet from the Monarch Trail.

We followed the trail to the Monarch Boardwalk and enjoyed the views – it was warm enough for the butterflies to be active, though some of them were beginning to cluster for the evening.

It was nice having my big camera again!

We decided to go back to the car via the beach instead of retracing our steps, so we got to see the remaining natural bridge.

We walked up to West Cliff Drive; it was far less busy than it is on a summer day, but there were still people enjoying the late afternoon.

And of course, there’s public art.

We had thought about walking down West Cliff to the Lighthouse Field State Beach and more monarchs, but it would have been too late to see much by the time we got there, so we turned at Swift Street and returned to the car. The traffic in Santa Cruz was very slow – I was actually relieved to get onto Highway 17 for the trip home.

Shabbat Shalom!

I’m glad I posted early yesterday, because it was eleven o’clock by the time we got home from picking Jeff up at SFO.

He had to work this morning, so Diane and I went out and ran our usual Thursday errands; today’s schedule included going back to the mechanic to have the Check Engine light turned off.

Jeff finished his work early, so we all went to Khaosan Thai for a leisurely lunch outside, followed by a long walk including a visit to the Amazon locker at Safeway where I picked up the subtly-colored Siri Remote case I’d ordered in hopes of keeping the remote from slipping under the couch cushions.

This evening, we watched Weird: The Al Yankovic Story – it was great. I wish there were a way to watch it without the commercial breaks, though.

And speaking of weird, the Check Engine light has returned. Back to the mechanic tomorrow!

ComedySportz San Jose is reopening next weekend, and tickets to their first shows were supposed to go on sale at 10am today. I wanted to be sure that we got tickets to the Friday night show, so I loaded the Buy Tickets page at 10am exactly.

It only listed two events for November, neither of them the one I wanted. I reloaded, saw no changes, waited a few minutes, reloaded again and still saw no changes – I realized that this was a job for the computer, not me. I looked at the source of the page and saw that the actual event list was on vbotickets.com. It was easy to figure out how to use curl and jq to get the count of events available in November. After that, it was trivial to create a one-line script that would check the count of events every 60 seconds and tell me when it was time to order tickets – I started it running and began preparing the marinade for Oven-Roasted Chicken Schwarma.

A few minutes later, I heard “Buy Tickets!” and saw the order page pop up on the screen, so I bought three tickets for next Friday night’s show and went back to making marinade.

Tonight, I have a Shir Hadash Board meeting, but I’m going to have to leave early so we can go to SFO and pick Jeff up (hence the need for three tickets). I’ll cope.