I see mountains. Snow covered ones!

I had a delightful spring break day off yesterday. I took a one-day road trip with my friends to Redding for another visit to the Sundial Bridge. If y'all remember, I went last summer on my roadtrip, but it was soooooo hot I wanted to go back so I could really enjoy it. Anyway, it was a gorgeous day - perfectly sunny and in the 70s - and the bridge was as nifty as ever. Debbie even packed a marvelous picnic - mmmmmmm. 

After a couple hours at the bridge and environs (we saw the Picasso ceramics exhibit - I had no idea Picasso did ceramics!) we headed to the hills to see the Allen Telescope Array. This was sort of a last-minute decision thing (which I was the one who made the final decision to go) and boy did the lack of research show. A co-worker said she went and that it was 20 miles outside Redding. Ok, so when we asked at the bridge, they said the array was 50 miles but we said, um ok let's go anyway. But we had no idea it was really more like 60 miles away, over a mountain pass about 6000 feet above sea level (covered in SNOW!!!!!). Heh, when we finally arrived at 5:00 pm, we were met with gates declaring visitor hours were from 10:00 - 3:00. Ooops! It was a lovely drive, but I really, really wanted to see all those telescopes! I wanted to marvel over the taxpayer money going towards looking for extraterrestrial signals in space. *sigh* Yet another instance of I'll have to go back later. 

It was a lovely day nonetheless. And I even started getting to know my digital camera. *groan* And I mean started, because I couldn't even find half the settings I was looking for. I found them like five minutes after I got home. You can enjoy the few pictures that survived the cut here.