Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Mammoth Lakes Travelog #2
Tuolumne Meadow, Yosemite · Sun, 5 Jul 2026. 3:pm.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, our road trip today to Mammoth Lakes takes us straight through Yosemite National Park. Bonus, right? And because we staggered our trip from the July 4 weekend, so we're going out when most crowds are heading home, we've enjoyed minimal traffic as we head out. Double bonus!

There's only one problem. The weather.

The "partly cloudy" promised in today's weather forecast— yesterday it promised full sun for today— turned into fully overcast skies by early afternoon. Today as we drove up past elev. 8,000' into Yosemite's Granite Country, everything was covered with a pall as if filmed in an overexposed, deteriorated black-and-white movie. The ground was gray, the sky was gray. There was no contrast. We skipped Olmstead Point with its view over Half Dome. We stopped briefly at Tenaya Lake, normally a stunning sapphire of the high country, but even the water gray as there were no colors to reflect.

We did stop again at a creek in Tuolumne Meadow and hopped out for a short walk.



We followed a footpath down to a small creek; I believe this is Lyell Creek. In the background you see Lembert Dome. There are hiking trails that loop around the back and up to the top of the granite bald. Hiking that was my plan for today! But in this crummy weather I'm just not feeling it. Oh, and I am feeling the effects of 8,000'+ elevation. So is Hawk. So maybe it's good the crummy weather gives us an excuse to nope out of hiking.

Ohio Waterfalls Travelog #26
Dublin, OH · Tue, 21 Apr 2026. 7pm

Today was a day of good parts and... not-so-good parts. Before I dwell on the negatives let me hit the high notes: We went on three waterfalls hikes in the area today. They were Hayden Falls, Millikin Falls, and Indian Run Falls. Each was short but relaxing and peaceful for how quickly we could get away from the burgeoning city around us. Oh, and the weather was beautiful. No more "WTF? It's only 43?!" like yesterday. Today it was in the mid-70s. I'm just doing daily updates right now, so I'll come back later and post details— and pictures!— from each of these hikes.

So, what was not-so-good? Mostly that I spent the whole morning not feeling well. First I slept in 'til, like, 9:30. It was late enough that I missed the hotel's breakfast. Not a problem, I figured; I'd just eat one of the various proteins bars I packed on the trip. I carry them both as car/airplane/trail snacks as well as in case any of the hotel breakfasts are unpalatable.But after eating a bar I had a painful knot in my stomach. I don't know if that was something bad about the bar— it's a newer variety I'm trying— or if it was a side effect of Ozempic. I lean toward the latter though it could also be some of the former, as well.

I took it easy in the hotel room until around noon. By then my stomach was feeling better... but I was also hungry. Hawk and I packed our bags for hiking and agreed to stop for some lunch first. We did that, and my stomach felt better after a solid meal. And the morning's rest. I enjoyed those three hikes in the afternoon without further problems.

This evening I've been taking it easy again. No, not because I'm feeling unwell. Hawk is meeting up with a former colleague who lives nearby. I opted out of joining them for dinner so they could dish the gossip. Instead I made a light dinner out of the hors d'oeuvres buffet the hotel offers in the evening and then came back up to the room to veg on the sofa with my computer. It's nice to have some downtime that's not because I'm feeling sick.

Wildflower Travelog #5
Bakersfield, CA · Thu, 12 Mar 2026. 6pm.

It's 6pm and we're settled in for the evening at our hotel in Bakersfield, California. Yes, it's a move from where we stayed last night. Yes, it's not that far away if you look at the map below. Yes, we could have just stayed at the other hotel two nights and kept things marginally simpler. Yes, I hate Bakersfield because it's a shit-hole. But I wanted to try this hotel tonight because they have a hot tub. Except when we got down to the hot tub about 30 minutes ago, we found it was out of service.

I hate Bakersfield. It's a shit-hole.

Ah, but what did we do today? It was a flowers road trip!


We started the morning up in the Grapevine at 4,000'. We then made three stops/scenic drives for wildflowers, particularly the California poppy, which is at the height of its seasonal bloom right now. One was a bloom we spotted from the road west of the Poppy Reserve, the second was at the Antelope Valley Antelope California Poppy Reserve State Park, and the third was a very scenic dirt-road drive east of the park.

It's ironic that, of these three areas, the state park devoted to poppies was the least bloom-y. But that's part of the nature of wildflowers: it's unpredictable from season to season exactly how well they'll bloom in a specific area at a specific time. When we visited a few years ago we also found that an area just outside the park had superior blooms (2022). Though when we visited during the 2019 superbloom the best views were in the park.

After visiting three wildflower spots today we were wildflower-ed out. The next stop we made was an attempt at rock-hounding for Hawk. Alas the spot her online guides took us to is marked as private property with "No Trespassing" signs. We're not the sort of people to ignore such signs— we respect private property—so we called it a day. We then drove the scenic, back-roads route to Tehachapi for an early dinner.

After dinner we drove down the mountain to Bakersfield, which is where we are now.

Canada travelog #14
Hamilton, ON · Mon, 25 Aug 2025. 4:30pm.

We're getting toward the end of the day, here. And it has been a busy one, including hits and misses. We decided to cap it off something mellow, a walk along the shores of Lake Ontario. We found on the map that Confederation Park in Hamilton looks like a good place for such a visit.

Confederation Park has huge parking lot and bath houses and a lot of other facilities... which, this afternoon, are all practically empty. Some of them even look closed for the season. It's still August! Of course here in Canada it's already kind of Autumn. The high temperature in this week's forecast range from the high 60s to low 70s (20-22° C). Not exactly beach weather.



Fortunately I didn't come here wanting a beach today, just a mellow stroll along the lake. Confederation Park delivers. I was surprised to see off in the distance across the lake I could see the downtown Toronto skyline. (And I could tell it was Toronto and not Mississauga because of the CN Tower.)

Kaiser Pass travelog #6
Back Home · Sun, 10 Aug 2025, 8:30am

We're back from our quick weekend trip to the Kaiser Pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains. How quick? Well, it started with our Friday Night Halfway in Fresno and finished when we got home late Saturday night. We were out for just over 29 hours. Here's a recap:

Friday night we arrived at our hotel. It's in Clovis, a smaller town adjacent to/a suburb of Fresno. Despite leaving later than I wanted, due to work going long, we got in earlier than I expected, due to traffic surprisingly not being shit on a summer Friday. Maybe it's because school started in many districts this past week and parents aren't taking their kids on weekend trips again yet? Anyway, despite arriving early enough to use the hotel's pool and hot tub we decided we'd rather just stretch out in our room. Partly that's because we used our pool and hot tub, at home, this afternoon.

Saturday morning I awoke with my 7am alarm then just puttered until 8. We didn't leave the hotel until almost 9. I'd have been frustrated about that but we didn't need to hurry. That's the point of Friday Night Halfway: to buy us more time to do things— and not have to rush— on Saturday. I noted as I checked the weather forecast that the high for the day in Fresno would be 106° F. 🥵 (That's 41° C for the rest of the world.) Well, it's a good thing we're not here for Fresno but to drive up into the high mountains. As a rule of thumb the temperature drops 3° per 1,000 feet of elevation, so at 7,000' it should be a warm but not stifling 85°.

Leaving town we stopped at Costco for gas then Del Taco for breakfast. As we got up into the mountains we stopped at a general store in Shaver Lake for snacks.

Our first activity was a drive up a 4x4 road to Kaiser Ridge. We'd already driven to the Kaiser Pass via California 168 and forest road 80. Now we left the pavement behind for another 1.5 miles on a dirt road to the top of the ridge. Up here we were at 10,000 feet with great views down across the Mono Valley of the San Joaquin River and the mountains beyond— or what would have been great views except that there was a lot of smoke in the air.  I joked some time back that when traveling in the West now we need to check not just the weather report but the fire report. It's turning out to be less a joke and more a prophesy. 🤦

Saturday afternoon we drove down the Kaiser Ridge to its far side, the Mono Valley. Why? Because buried deep in there are Mono Hot Springs, a cluster of natural hot springs fed by geothermal activity. There's a small resort there but also a handful of pools that are on Forest Service ground. We hiked a short trail to them and Hawk took a dip.

Late afternoon we stopped to hike Rancheria Falls on our way back down the west side of Kaiser Ridge. We've visited there once before, a few years ago. It was definitely worth visiting again. It was mellow in the late afternoon hours, and the light was perfect.

We got back to Clovis a bit after 7pm. We weren't staying another night, just stopping through for dinner and gas. We'd tried for dinner at a small pizza shop in Shaver Lake, but the staff there warned us the wait was 90 minutes to cook a pizza. We figured we could drive 60 minutes to the Fresno area and still eat sooner than that, plus be 60 minutes closer to home.

The last part of the drive home was late. We finished with dinner and getting gas around 8:15, but then it was over 2 hours home. We were both fading hard. I drove for an hour and a half, then Hawk took the last 45 minutes as I nodded in and out. We got home around 11, unpacked the car, then I took a shower and tumbled into bed.

Oregon Cascades Travelog #20
Bend, OR - Fri, 4 Jul 2025, 10:45pm

We spent a lot of the day taking it easy in Bend today. Really too much of the day. I get it that sometimes the weather doesn't cooperate with outdoors adventure plans, or that we need to take an easy day when we're traveling, or both. The take-an-easy-day thing is a reality we've faced more frequently as we get older. I accept that. But as I gazed at the bright blue sky out the window of our hotel room— a blue sky that the weather forecast continued to insist did not exist, had not existing at all today, and would not exist until tomorrow— I grew frustrated that what started as "Sure, let's take it easy" had turned into frittering. Inertia. Languor.

Hawk was still feeling out of sorts. She made it clear that she was willing to hike but not in a headspace to plan things or make decisions. She knows I know what she likes and is willing and able to do, so she trusted me to do the planning. I reviewed the lists of hikes we'd collected for this trip, checking them against maps for what there was still time in the day to do. As the hour wound toward 3pm we'd already frittered away more than half the day. But surely there was something to do. Indeed, I came up with not one but two possible hiking itineraries. One was desert-y and the other waterfall-y. Knowing Hawk, I figured the one with the waterfalls would be better. And I felt more like seeing waterfalls, too.

We drove northeast from Bend over the crest of the Cascade Mountains to Willamette National Forest. First we visited Gooch Falls, then drove south to another trailhead for the two-fer of Sahalie Falls and Koosah Falls. Actually the latter was more like a three-fer or even four-fer, as the McKenzie River flowing over these big falls also cascaded over a few smaller falls in between them.

As with the past few days, I'm holding up on detailed blogs with photos to keep more on top of the chronology of the trip. I'll add links here when I'm ready to post those blogs.

You may notice that the driving route for this trip bears a lot of resemblance to our trip of two days ago, when we hiked Downing Creek Falls and Proxy Falls. Indeed we drove right past the turnoff for Downing Creek Falls on our way to Gooch Falls today, and the drive from there to Sahalie and Koosah overlapped part of our drive to Proxy Falls.

"Why didn't we combine these trips together better?" you might wonder. I wondered that, too. And I was frustrated about it. The simple answer is that we didn't plan well enough. We didn't adequately research the location of all the hikes on our various lists. On the other hand, even if we did research them better, there are the issues of time and energy. There aren't enough of either to do all the proximally located hikes in one day. So we made another trip back over the summit and hiked them today.

And you know what? These hikes were awesome. All my frustrations about doing the same drive again two days later melted away, completely disappeared, as I saw the surprisingly big Gooch Falls. And Sahalie and Koosah and all the little falls in between them made today an excellent day— even though we didn't leave the hotel until just after 3pm.

Of course, the morning wasn't wasted. Soaking in the hot tub was nice. And late this evening I went back out to the hot tub for another soak. Oh, and during this soak, at 10pm, there were fireworks— because it's July 4th! I relaxed in the hot water with hotel neighbors I'd just met, watching the fireworks show for 30 minutes.

Oregon Cascades Travelog #13
Bend, OR - Wed, 2 Jul 2025, 9:30pm

Our Day 2 of this Oregon Cascades vacation has been a very full and fulfilling one. Yesterday was only a part day of vacation because it was also a work day (for me). But today we spent the whole day on leisure, leaving our hotel around 9am and not returning until after 9pm. In the middle we did 3 hikes, visited 6 waterfalls— or maybe more; I lost count— and drove 187 miles.

We left our room at the Days Inn in Bend around 9am. Yeah, we slept in a bit today. I swatted the snooze button until almost 7:30 then took my time getting ready after that. A curious thing is that when we were loading our car just before 9 we saw what late risers we were. The hotel parking lot, which was full last night, was now 75% empty, and half the remaining cars had doors and trunks open with people buzzing around them, loading bikes, coolers, etc. I'll add that to my notes about the Days Inn brand: this one, at least, is popular with the outdoors activity demographic. Unlike, say, the tweaker and drug dealer demographic.

Our first hike of the day was Tumalo Falls, not far outside of Bend to the west. I'll save my notes about the trek and pics of the waterfall for when I write a full blog about it. For now it's added to my backlog so I don't fall further behind in writing about this trip. Long story short, though, Tumalo was amazing. The main falls was almost 100' tall, and there were additional waterfalls higher up on the trail.

After hiking Tumalo it was lunchtime. Being not far from Bend was a plus because we could drive back into town to eat some real food instead of protein bars and water from our trail rations. We found a frou-frou burger place on the west side of town. Hawk got a custom burger made to her specifications with avocado, while I enjoyed a lamb burger with feta cheese and tzatziki sauce.

Fueled up for the next several hours we headed northwest on US 20 over the Santiam pass. Our destination was Downing Creek Falls. The trail description I found on a blog written by a local gal said it was hard to find. She did not lie. We overshot the unmarked dirt road twice. Then, once on it, it was a narrow two-track with no signs of where to go. Between her blog and notes on AllTrails.com we found the right place and enjoyed a stunning falls all to ourselves.

After Downing Creek we headed south back toward the pass and then down into the canyon of the headwaters of the McKenzie River. We then turn back east and headed back uphill toward the McKenzie Pass. Along the way we stopped to hike Proxy Falls. Proxy Falls has both an upper and lower falls on a loop trail. The lower falls is the bigger of the two but is hard to see from the trail. We made up for that by scrambling down a hill, off trail, then walking on logs across a creek, then wet-footing it out into the creek at the bottom of the falls to gaze up at it. Wow. I hope the photos I'll share soon turn out as amazing as the falls did in person.

As we finished hiking at Proxy Falls it was already getting late— almost 6:30pm. We thought we'd just drive up over the McKenzie Pass and down to Bend for dinner. Or maybe stop 20 minutes early in the small town of Sisters. But when we got to the top of the pass the views forced us to stop. Atop the pass, the winding little state highway traverses a lava field. There's nothing but lava rock visible in any direction— except for the tall volcanic peaks in the distance on all sides! And, at the top of the pass, there's an observatory... that's made out of volcanic rock. We couldn't resist stopping and seeing that in the golden light of the setting sun.

Somehow the stark beauty of the McKenzie Pass sated our appetites just long enough to drive back down into Bend. We picked out a Mexican restaurant for dinner and enjoyed plates of enchiladas there. Afterward we ran a few errands: buying groceries for the next day and filling the car with gas. We're back late this evening, but we're planning to get out early tomorrow for a big hike.

Sunday we made a day trip out to Zim Zim Falls. It's a fairly tall waterfalls in a fairly remote corner of the Bay Area. It's in Napa County, but not the part you think of when you hear "Napa Valley". There are no wineries, tasting rooms, or hot-spring lodges nearby. It 's out in the wilderness.

We rolled out of our garage just before 9:30am, having slept in a bit and then waited to see if we were up for a big day outdoors. It seemed like we were, so we filled water in our packs, stuffed changes of clothes in a sack, and set out for the day.

Getting to Zim Zim always feels like a bit of adventure in and of itself. The past few times I've thought of the road trip as having two parts, but this weekend I've realized it's really three.

Part One is zooming along interstate highways up to Cordelia, California. If you're not a local you might be wondering, "Where?" It's the small town on the edge of the Bay Area where I-680 ends at I-80— or where 680 begins as it forks off from 80, depending on your perspective. For us it's also a typical spot for an early lunch break on this trip. There's a Del Taco here, and eating at Del Taco is one of our guilty pleasures. We only get to do it on road trips, though. This one 73 miles away is practically the closest one to us!

Part Two of the trip is driving country roads up through Solano and Napa Counties. There are wineries back here, unlike what I said in the first paragraph, above. But the wineries are in the southern part of the leg of this trip, in the Suisun Valley geographical area.

Part Three of the drive starts as we turn off of Route 128 onto Berryessa Knoxville Road. In the past I've thought of this as an extension of part 2, but then each time I've gotten frustrated at how long it takes. Sunday I measured it. It's 24 miles. And the last several of those miles are slow— actually slower and slower each year— because the road is in increasingly poor shape as it climbs above Lake Berryessa. Notably the road involves 3 water crossings to get to the trailhead for Zim Zim.



This weekend two were dry and the third had only an inch or so of water flowing across the road bed. But that wasn't the hard part of the drive. No, the part where I was thinking, This is probably the last year we drive here in our sports car convertible, was the crumbling road itself. The potholes are getting worse and worse.

Well, right around 12:30 we got to the trailhead. The drive had taken 3 hours, including our stop for brunch at Del Taco. Time to hike!

Georgia Travelog #23
Helton Creek - Saturday, 12 Apr 2025, 6pm

Today has been another day of driving around the Appalachian Mountains of north Georgia, but unlike yesterday— when it rained on us most of the day— today has been beautiful. As a result we've had a fairly packed day.

Once again we started out from the Holiday Inn Express in Dawsonville— except this morning we checked out. Tonight we're not done 'til we get to Atlanta! But first there was so much else.

Today our first stop was in Helen, the over-the-top charming kitschy shrieking tourist trap of a town made up to look like a German alpine village. We thought it might be a good place to get some morning eats! Alas the German bakery we'd spotted yesterday was really a German confectionery. Meaning, most of what they sell ready-to-eat is sugary sweets. I didn't feel like a Bavarian cream donut with a side of cheese danish for breakfast, so we sulked back out to the car where I ate a protein bar as we continued our drive.

Next up was Anna Ruby Falls a bit north of Helen. This falls blew me away. It's reached by a totally paved trail. It's steep but doesn't have stairs like Amicalola Falls (which we visited Thursday). Its tourist-friendliness isn't what blew me away, though. It's that up at the end of the canyon is a double falls. Two different creeks falls the back wall of the canyon and merge at the bottom.

After the falls we doubled back to Helen for lunch. Yes, we thought eating in the tourist trap town would be fun! We scrupulously avoided all the tourist trappy places, though, and shared a pizza at a low-key pizzeria. Then we went back to that bakery we skipped out of in the morning, because Bavarian cream donuts with a side of cheese danish.

Our next stop was Upper Chattahoochee Campground to hike to Horse Trough Falls. This is one where the drive to get there turned into an adventure. The Apple Maps piped through my mobile phone into the car's infotainment system recommended a slightly different route than the Google Map I've embedded above. Yeah, make your jokes about Apple Maps; but this is the first time they've steered me wrong. We wound up taking a much longer drive on dirt Forest Service roads than we needed to. And a few times it took interpolating between Apple Maps and AllTrails to figure out the right way to go. But we did get there, safely, and had a bit of fun making it an offroad adventure. In a rental car.

Once we got to the trailhead for Horse Trough Falls— and OMG, what a terrible name— we had the place almost entirely to ourselves. Maybe other people got a bum steer from Apple Maps, too, but couldn't find their way out of it like I did. 🤣

The falls were a mostly level 1/2 mile walk from the parking lot. It could have been even shorter but the actual Upper Chattahoochee Campground was still closed for the season... despite signs from last year saying it'd reopen March 15. Oops, maybe the people responsible for reopening the campground got sacked in one of DOGE's mass firings. 😰

Horse Trough was another falls that blew me away. It wasn't as epic as Anna Ruby but it was still way more than I expected out here, at what felt like the (horse's) ass end of nowhere.

After Horse Trough we switched gears a bit and did a non-waterfall hike. Instead of a falls we visited the top of a mountain. And not just any mountain, but Brasstown Bald, elev. 4,784', the highest peak in Georgia. It was late, almost 4pm, when we got to the visitors center a few hundred feet below the summit. I wondered if I should've dropped it from the list to save time for other hikes but I chose instead to trust in the continued sunny weather and sunset just after 8pm to give us more time to play. We had a good late-afternoon visit up there and still had time for two more waterfalls!

Trahlyta Falls wasn't so much a hike as a jump-out-of-the-car-and-take-pictures situation. Yes, there was a hike we could do, but it was in a state park that had a lot of construction going on. It was a headache to deal with. So we drove out of the park and back around to an unmarked pulloff on the highway where we snapped pictures from across the creek canyon.

Finally we made it over to Helton Creek Falls. It was only about 15 minutes from Trahlyta, though it may have taken longer as once more we had to drive a few miles on a dirt road to get to a falls. Once more, though, the falls exceeded my expectations. I was ready for a maybe 20-foot tall falls. Instead we got a 100' tall falls in multiple drops!

Non-Vegas Vegas Weekend Travelog #10
Valley of Fire State Park - Sun, 16 Feb 2025, 10am

Another day in Las Vegas— Henderson, actually— another day we leave town to do stuff elsewhere. Today's elsewhere is Valley of Fire State Park. It's about an hour north of town.



We've been here a few times before. Most recently two years ago. We figured that's long enough ago that it's worth visiting again. The park's fiery red rocks, from which it gets its name, make it worth it.



Today we did get out earlier than yesterday. I was frustrated yesterday that we were futzing around in town until about 11am and only got out to the first trailhead by almost noon. I set a goal of rolling from the hotel this morning by 8.... We didn't make it, but we did leave by 8:20/8:25, which didn't suck. The point of it was to keep plenty of time for hiking today. Oh, and to get started before the park gets hella crowded on this holiday weekend when the temperatures are mild.



From the visitors center, where I took the selfie at the top of this journal entry, a road climbs up a mountain into the heart of the red rocks country here. Along this road are trailheads for two great hikes, the White Domes loop, and the iconic Fire Wave trail / Seven Wonders loop. We'll hike them both today then see what else we have time & energy for.

To be continued....