Author: TravellinPenguin

We spent the day in Mill Valley in the middle of a large redwood forest. It is situated north of San Francisco and each year they hold a very large arts festival. Lots of people attend with their families and dogs. Saw a few quirky outfits and there are food stalls set up. I enjoyed the photography exhibits but I didn’t see any street photography on display or much travel photography outside of a German photographer’s wonderful photos of wildlife from around the world. They were truly stunning.

Of course I could not photograph the exhibits so you’ll just have to believe me.  If you’re interested, scroll down to see my captioned photos. If not, close this post and wait for another post on books. I have finished a few.

Today arrived and we had a couple of festivals we could attend. We narrowed it down to an Arts Festival and a Native American Indian festival.  We chose the Native Americans.  Hosting this festival in the lovely Miwok Park in Novato was the Miwok tribe. The word Miwok means “people” in their native language. 

As I knew nothing of this tribe and in fact had never heard of them I looked them up in Wikipedia and learned:

“The predominant theory regarding the settlement of the Americas date the original migrations of the Miwok tribe from Asia to around 20,000 years ago across the Bering Strait land bridge, but anthropologists claim that the Miwok and some other California tribes descend from Siberians who arrived in California by sea around 3,000 years ago.

The Miwok lived in small bands without centralised political authority before contact with European Americans in 1769. They had domesticated dogs and cultivated tobacco, but were otherwise hunter-gatherers.

The Sierra Miwok harvested acorns from the California Black Oak.  In fact, the modern-day extent of the California Black Oak forests in some areas of Yosemite National Park is partially due to cultivation by Miwok tribes. 

They burned vegetation to reduce the amount of Ponderosa Pine.  Nearly every other kind of edible vegetable matter was used as a food source, including bulbs, seeds, and fungi. Animals were hunted with arrows, clubs or snares, depending on the species and the situation. Grasshoppers were a highly prized food source, as were mussels for those groups adjacent to the Stanislaus River.

The Miwok ate meals according to appetite rather than at regular times. They stored food for later consumption, primarily in flat-bottomed baskets. 

Miwok spiritual narratives tend to be similar to those of other natives of Northern California. The Miwok had totem animals, identified with one of two moieties which were in turn associated respectively with land and water. These totem animals were not thought of as literal ancestors of humans, but rather as predecessors.

Enjoy the photos below:

After a more than 24 hour journey I arrived safely in the San Francisco area. It has been a quiet week of just mucking about with my sister and doing a couple of day trips. We enjoyed a day out at the Samuel P Taylor State Park. I wanted to see some redwood trees and as always am never disappointed by them.

I was not familiar with old Samuel P Taylor so I decided to see why he had a state park named after him. According to trusty Wikipedia I learned that-

“The park is named for Samuel Penfield Taylor, who found gold during the California Gold Rush and used some of his money to buy a parcel of land along Lagunitas Creek. In 1856, Taylor built the Pioneer Paper Mill, the first paper mill on the Pacific Coast. In the 1870s, the North Pacific Coast Railroad was built between Cazadero and a pier in Sausalito where passengers could transfer to a ferry to San Francisco. The railroad passed near Taylor’s mill, and, ever the entrepreneur, he built the “Camp Taylor Resort” alongside the tracks. A destination for city-weary San Franciscans, the resort offered both a hotel and tent camping, as well as swimming, boating, fishing, and a dance pavilion.”

My sister and I have also taken a few smaller walks around her neighbourhood so I could take some photos. I share them wih you below.

We thought we might do a bit of a road trip through northern California to Oregon but have decided against it due to the big fires around Redding and farther north. With evacuations most likely causing accommodation filling up quickly and heavy smoke in the air we have decided against it and will entertain ourselves staying closer to San Franciso. Enjoy the photos.

On the bookish front we enjoyed watching The Great American Read program on the PBS TV app on her Roku box. It was fun to hear authors talking about the classic books they have enjoyed and made me wonder which of the mentioned books are currently sitting on my shelf. I would like to read more of the works of the classic authors mentioned and even better to take those from my shelf to look at. I have some of the lesser works from several authors mixed in with some of the Penguin boxed sets that set on the shelves looking at me. In any case, there is never going to be a time when we run out of things to read. What a comforting thought.