Greetings from San Andreas

If I had a fangirl day on Tuesday and a nature sightseeing day on Wednesday, then Thursday was a combination. We went first to the Japanese Garden at the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, which is a wildlife preserve and with beautiful flowers and a teahouse that is also home to the building best known on film as Starfleet Academy, all of which are stunning (this time we even toured the water filtration facilities, which are really interesting after having seen the Paris sewers). Then we drove to Palmdale to see the visible part of the San Andreas Fault nearest where we're staying outside Los Angeles, where we walked through desert brush with lizards to see the schisms in the rock formation.

From there we drove to Vasquez Rocks, which has featured in many, many movies and TV shows (most notably among my friends as the place where Kirk fought the Gorn, though it's also, for instance, where Hedley Lamarr rounded up his posse in Blazing Saddles and where Colin Firth and Matthew Goode canoodled in A Single Man's flashback scene). Only Adam climbed all the way up the rocks (and found a snake); the rest of us found lizards and flowers in the crevices, and we all ate lunch and visited the nature center. We also went to Garden of the Gods, a park that was once part of the Iverson Movie Ranch where many Westerns were filmed, where we saw people bouldering and more lizards.

After a stop at a Target because Daniel needed a dress shirt for Saturday and the rest of us wanted cold drinks, we went to Paul's brother David's new house to meet Maria, the woman he's going to marry this weekend, and see his kids, her kids, his and Paul's brother Jon, and their many pets. All three brothers and their parents were there, and we took Maddy shopping for wedding necessities for a bit while the bride and groom were picking up their rings. They brought in pizza and we played with their three dogs in their beautiful backyard. Here are mostly family photos; I'll get to the nature pictures in a few days!