The rain finally stopped after what seemed like forever.  With beautiful weather, it was time to get some hiking in. 

Saturday it was off to the Long Ridge Open Space Preserve.   The preserve is off Skyline and it was a twisty road to get there- lots of fun to drive.  Getting there mid-afternoon and with a busy evening planned, we only had a couple hours to explore.  It was nearly deserted and we made a loop, including an intense uphill part.  The lighting was challenging for the photographs.  Lots of shadows and brights in the same picture and moving in and out of the shadows required constant fiddling with the camera.  Here are the photos:

http://www.sanjoseabrams.com/photos/LongRidgeFeb2008

Sunday L’ took me to one of her favorite hikes near Half Moon Bay.  It was windy at times, but the views were spectacular.  We saw a few elephant seals in the  ocean right off the beach.  The tide wasn’t low enough to walk the whole loop along the beach, but it was still quite pretty.  It reminded me of Point Reyes, only without a two hour car ride.  

A new experiment with the Half Moon Bay Hike was to try syncing the photos with the GPS tracking recorded by L”s GPS device.  This was fairly easy after a little web research.  I’m still working on the best way to display the map and photos together.  For now, there is a "See Map" link on each photo page (in the bottom right next to the photograph information) that will pull up a Google terrain map of where the photo was taken.   Here are the photos:

http://www.sanjoseabrams.com/photos/HalfMoonBayFeb2008