Succulents and More™

Every summer a close friend from Australia spends a couple of weeks with us so he can go flying at a local airport. Last year I flew with him to Willows , a small Sacramento Valley town about an hour north of here. Check out this post for photos. This year we flew from Davis to Auburn in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento.   It’s amazing how much you can see from a small Cessna. Like last year, we started out with a great view of Interstate 80.   Soon we saw the Sacramento River and the lush farmland on either side.  

On Monday I had the opportunity to go flying with our friend B. who is visiting from Australia. I had flown with him several times before, and I was only too happy to do it again. The world is so different from the air—what looks familiar on the ground sometimes isn’t all that easy to identify from above. We flew from University Airport here in Davis up to Willows , about 60 miles north, had breakfast at the airport diner (yes, there is such a thing even in Willows, population 6,000), and then flew back. It wasn’t a long flight, but I was mentally exhausted—in a good way—when we landed because I had done so much looking and photographing. The Sacramento Valley is a major rice-growing region. The rice fields still have lots of water in them so the reflections of the sun were phenomenal. Just as impressive was seeing the geometry of fields and orchards, and the juxtaposition between irrigated areas—green and lush—and non-irrigated land—brown and parched. Just before landing in Davis...