A landscape photographer's tour

Lakeport, CA to San Francisco

Keith's travels in California and the Pacific Northwest - April-May 2007

This photo-diary covers a driving trip up the coast from San Francisco in April/May 2007 along the Pacific highway. Now I've returned, I've included some of my travel photography from this trip in the main Gallery, and updated any info that may be of help to people who come across these pages as part of their planning for driving tours of the California and Oregon coasts, looking for places to stay or sites to visit. It's a great place for a vacation, or just a road trip up the Pacific coast to photograph some of the scenery. If you've any questions about the hotels/inns/motels where I stayed, then please do feel free to drop me a line.

An early start from Lakeport. At least the sun is out.

Bright early sun at the Anchorage Motel.

You can see some of the overnight rain on the windscreen (or 'windshield' to US readers ;-)

a quick detour to the lake to see a much calmer lake surface today.

Heading(west) up over the hills towards Hopland, there are some very nice looking oak forests.

However, just over the highest point, the weather changes very quickly (note rain drops)

just high cloud though, as the road winds back down again

Here, it's back on Hwy 101 heading south

and west again - suddenly it's more like driving through parts of France, with vinyards everywhere

I'm following the Russian river back to Jenner on the coast, where I stayed at the beginning of the trip.

I stopped off for a coffee in Guerneville.

Lots of people standing around waiting for work. Judging by the looks I got walking past them earlier when carrying a camera, I'd suspect some might not be entirely legal. That said, the last time I had a camera and a big obvious lens at Leicester market, there were a surprisingly large number of people 'working' who were not too keen having a camera pointed in their general direction

I popped into the local safeway to pick up a few items...

The blur is Barbara (below) hastily packing my stuff for me, expressing disbelief that we don't have people to pack our bags for us back in the UK...

The blue item in the bag being one of the odd items (Oreos) that I was requested to bring back from the US.

The Russian river is a nice drive to the coast.

At least it's not raining :-)

This B/W shot below actually shows a bit too much noise in the darker parts of the sky. It's a combination of the quick conversion I've done (using CS3 B/W adjustments) and the JPEG compression

There are lots of wild flowers all along the cliff-tops

and after a while the sun came out, giving a deep colour to parts of the sea

Not a bad day to finish off my visit to the States :-)

I stopped off in Pt. Reyes Station to have another coffee and check my email.

Coffee at Toby's where I was told there was WiFi connectivity - unfortunately no-one knew the password. However there was an open network in a business further into the shed. It's the first time I've checked my mail drinking coffee andsitting on some sacks of fertiliser...

In the picture, Brian, also using a Mac :-)

And so, back across the Golden Gate bridge - much clearer view today.

I'm back at the Millwood Inn, in Millbrae, now waiting to head off in the morning.