Mt.WHAT?

I feel surfeited with beauty. After sleeping in and having a leisurely morning, including a pleasant walk through the neighborhood, Brad and I decided to head up Mt. Diablo. ( Driving…not hiking). (Elevation 3,800 feet.) I have been out here to Danville four or five times and every time, we mean to go up there, and for one reason or another, it’s never worked out…until today!
Wow…talk about breathtaking - in more ways than one. The scenery was amazing, unbelievably round, green hills, deep valleys…and the lack of guardrail + stunning drop-offs= my eyeballs bulging. At every other hairpin turn, it felt like I was completely hollow, having left all my innards at the last hairpin turn. The weather was really nice - not totally clear but clear enough to barely see the Golden Gate Bridge…and the Sierra Nevadas. There were lots of other people going up and down…mostly on BIKES! Oh my word - my heart was palpitating enough with us being in an SUV…I can’t imagine being on a bike. We even saw a couple on a tandem bike! No, thanks - not for me.
We walked around at the top, and took pictures. The view is absolutely fabulous. My favorite part was the stone house/visitor center at the top because the stones it was made from, taken from the top of the mountain, had SHELL fossils embedded into them. It was the most fascinating thing. For some reason, seeing those fossilized shells on the outer walls of the house/tower thrilled me in the most bizarre way. I wanted to jump up and down and point them out to everybody. LOOK! Fossilized shells - at 3,000 ft. above sea level! How do you think they got here? Needless to say, we got pictures.
The top of Mount Diablo was going to be the place that Brad proposed to me…when I was out here in December 2000- January 2001...but the time wasn’t right and so it never happened. I guess it was a good thing because it would have been an inauspicious place to get engaged - the Mountain of the Devil! Heading down the mountain, I was taking pictures like mad. I felt like an old lady taking useless scenery pictures…and pictures taken from a car, at that - the height of photographic excellence. But that’s the joy of digital - you can take all the dumb, blurry pictures you want and you - or your husband - can delete them later, but once in a while you get a neat shot. You can’t just sit there in the car and let these gorgeous vistas go by without TRYING to capture them somehow.
We pulled over on the way down, and got out to take pictures in a field of poppies. I think if one were to eat a Californian poppy, it would taste like an orange creamsicle. But this hypothesis will probably never be tested…because it’s illegal to pick them…so I imagine, eating them is off limits too. Sigh.
What a heavenly place - I could have stayed there all day and been perfectly happy.