inglorious wanderer

I would consider walking a bike at the Golden Gate Bridge hiking. And hiking it is. Although I did not plan on it.  The plan was to bike the 1.7 mile suspension bridge that connects the San Francisco Peninsula to the Marin Headlands over the Golden Gate Strait.  The strait that separates the San Francisco Peninsula from the narrow piece of land that projects from the Northern California coastline into Pacific Ocean reminded John C. Fremont, a topographical engineer of the U.S. Army in the 1840's of a harbor in Istanbul called Chrysoceras or Golden Horn. Fremont thought of the strait as Chrysophylae or Golden Gate.  Upon completion of the bridge in 1937, after four years of construction, Joseph P. Strauss, then  chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District  wrote a poem titled "The Mighty Task is Done". The following excerpt sums up my impression on the bridge, having visited it for the third time, today.   "To north, the Red...

It's chill out time for Lou. We just summitted Mount Calavera, a lesser peak sorrounded by high-income homes in Carlsbad. Carlbad may have been named after Karlsbad, a town in Baden, Germany.  Carlsbad's Lake Calavera is said to be the largest of the several managed nature preserves in the city. Batiquitos Lagoon, which I have hiked once, is one of them.  I was not even aware there is a Mount Calavera in the Calavera Open Preserve. Calavera is the Spanish word for skull. If the mountain is likened to a skull, Malou and I were at the bald spot. The bald spot summit is overlooking the Denk Tank Mountain to the south, more open space preserve to the south east and apartment complexes to the north. The west is the coastal area where a marsh land would be.