Thursday in California

We did a tour of JR and Ashley's house this morning!  The weather is just beautiful here, nice and mild in the daytime - no jacket needed.

This is Mercury posing for a picture in the den...

View of the backyard from the den...

Stairs leading down to the backyard from the den...

The pool (so nice!) but not really warm enough to swim...

Beautiful maple leaves along the back fence...

There's a prolific lemon tree - lots of ripe lemons.....

From the very back fence of the yard...the back of the house...

This frog prince keeps watch over the pool while doing his yoga ....

A nice persimmon tree with several fruit...

Ashley has several pots of succulents along the fences....

The backyard in front of the shop and garage....

Ashley and JR planted a small kitchen herb garden here....

JR and John in the kitchen...

Today JR had to do some work early in the morning, but we went out at lunch time to eat at one of the local restaurants in Castro Valley/Hayward area (all the towns in California kind of run into each other).  I had an excellent portobello mushroom sandwich and drank their pumpkin ale. Really quite good!  John tried their Tasmanian Devil and the Blueberry Stout (which he really liked the best).  Nice little place.

They had several huge pumpkins in the place!

A mural along one of the side streets.  

JR made us some tasty grilled steaks that evening - delicious - then we watched a movie (The Pineapple Express.)  Tomorrow we're going to take a little trip to some lake which I'll tell you all about then.