This weekend’s weather was surprisingly good…. nice warm and sunny. We spent several hours taking photos inside the house and at the backyard. We initially plan to visit the nearby Como Park, but Richard passed out in the afternoon. Nevertheless, the photos taken at the backyard turned out rather good.

In the evening, we headed to a sushi restaurant in Woodbury for dinner. The sushi buffet was really awesome and we had unimaginable amount of fresh raw fishes, sushi rolls, tempuras and many other weird stuff… one of the best and cheapest sushi we have ever had in Minnesota. Four of us probably consumed at least $200 to $300 worth of sushi that evening… if we come back frequently, this restaurant will file for bankruptcy soon.

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Several of us attended Joe and Ann’s wedding and reception in Wisconsin on Saturday. The wedding was held in a church in Portage while the reception was held in an awesome restaurant in Wisconsin Dells. Somehow, Joe introduced me to his mom as “The Taco Salad” guy… at least, he didn’t say I was selling Taco Salad in the cafeteria. I could only imagine what his mom thinks we actually do at work besides eating. The reception dinner was really awesome even though I still find it hard to believe that Joe and Ann actually fed everyone with half a chicken on every plate. By the way, our dinner table was the only table with Wisconsin cheese curds. Corey was kind enough to buy me a bag of authentic “squeek-free” Wisconsin cheese curds. To past my time during the reception, I made monkey faces at Conor in attempt to make him cry… heh… what a role model for this kid.

While some of us left for home right after the dinner, Angelina and I spent a night in Wisconsin Dells so that we could visit the nearby Devil’s Lake State Park. This state park is reported to be the most visited state park in Wisconsin. The scenery is just spectacular, even more spectacular now with fall color. The morning hike was terribly cold. Since we hiked up the rocky, steep and strenuous trails that are not blanketed by tall trees, the strong wind was sometimes unbearably wild and nearly threw us off balance on a few occasions. By the time we left the park, it became really cloudy and when we drove across the Minnesota border, it began to snow heavily… yep, first snow day of the year (I think).

By the way, this album doesn’t have any wedding pictures of Joe and Ann. I was too tired to take pictures after a long drive… so, yeah….

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We initially planned to spend some time in Winona on Saturday morning, but by the time we arrived there, the surrounding area was covered by a dense fog. So, we switched to Plan B and visited Lanesboro and the nearby towns first. On Sunday, we went hiking in Great River Bluffs State Park before stopping by in Winona for lunch. Since I lived in Winona for several years, I was several fond memories of this place… such as roller-blading around the Winona Lake, or roller-blading and crashing onto some poor kids who couldn’t decide whether to peddle the tricycles on the left lane or right lane. By the way, the gas price in Winona was really cheap and we made sure to fill up the gas before heading back home.

While some places have past the peak of fall colors, we managed to capture some spectacular scenery in Great River Bluffs State Park. The hiking trails are fairly short and flat… so, we spent the whole morning covering most of the trails.

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Dalton is now 5-month old. He was surprisingly in good mood most of the time, apart from the incident where he accidentally knocked his head on the mini windmill (heh). Dalton’s trigger word is TRRR with the repeating and rolling Rs. To get his attention, just say that magic word in one really long breath… and KAZAAM!, he will smile in return… it’s that easy.

This year’s fall colors peak seems late… most trees along the Zumbro lake are still green in color. Nevertheless, there are plenty of nice sceneries at the surrounding area. Our day ended with a short boat ride where Captain Dalton graciously navigated the boat… get him an eye patch and he will be Captain “Pirate” Dalton… ARRR!

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I must admit this trip was somewhat disappointing at first because the further north we drove, the greener the leaves were. Perhaps, our expectation skyrocketed after passing by many golden corn fields and plutonium green fields. So, after hiking the trails in Tettegouche State Park and Temperance River State Park on Friday, we decided to forgo our visit to Cascade River State Park and spent more time in Grand Portage State Park on Saturday. There, we finally enjoyed some really nice fall colors after a few hours of deep forest hiking. Somehow, the weather was rather bone chilling cold on the weekend, with the temperature hovering around 50s. Nevertheless, the cool temperature made the hiking trip a little more enjoyable.

We had both of our dinners in Grand Marais… pretty touristy. For our first night, we had our meals at My Sister’s Place. We came to know about this place through the Travel Channel’s “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern” where Andrew tried out fried gizzard. This place is famous for its tasty burgers. So, we also tried fried gizzard and two burgers. There is nothing bizarre about eating the gizzard, not sure why Andrew made a big fuss about it. We Chinese folks eat practically anything that crosses our path (except human because we don’t do cannibalism). For our second night, we had some of the best Lake Superior fishes at Angry Trout Cafe. We had yummy grilled Trout and deep fried Herring… no wonder the Trout is angry because we just reduced its population, at least the Herring is pretty happy about it. We were glad to have our dinner early because there were lots of people waiting to be seated by the time we left.

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Conor seemed to be really into this “Guitar Hero” thing, like his dad. Once we threw a guitar on him, he was in the zone and never bother looking at the camera anymore. In fact, Conor could impersonate Jimi Hendrix’s teeth solo and drool all over the guitar. Heck, if we pass him a matchstick, he could even light up the guitar like Jimi. We also realized that Conor responded positively to the word “touchdown”, used by his grandpa in an attempt to make him smile. That being said, Corey’s neighbors probably wondered why there were so many TOUCHDOOOOOWN cheers when in fact the football season has yet officially begun.

As for me, the best part of this photo shoot is we got two jars of awesome homemade salsa from Corey and Liz before we left. The salsa was so good that we nearly finished them all in less than two days. The web album consists of roughly half of the overall photos taken.

TOUCHDOOOOOWN !!!

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During that weekend, I taught Richard how to depress the spacebar key on my external Apple keyboard and he nearly wiped out a chunk of my production code at one point of time. In fact, he was so good that he sat on my left leg, depressing spacebar on any monsters appearing on the screen while I navigated my Diablo RPG character around with my right handed mouse… pretty spiffy.

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That evening seemed like a good time for outdoor photos. It was ~2 hours before sunset, not too hot and the sun wasn’t at the horizon to wash away the skin tone. We also ventured along the “Walnut Tree” trail to the mini pine tree plantation… now that I know the location of the trees, I will sneak here some night to chop down couple of trees for this coming Christmas.

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While Angelina and I have been to San Francisco several times, we decided to bring our parents there because San Francisco has many attractions that they could relate to from what they have seen in TV, such as Golden Gate Bridge and. that’s about it. Further, we wanted to visit Yosemite National Park so badly that we made an excuse to visit San Francisco again. We also visited several places located north of San Francisco, such as Sausalito, Muir Woods, Point Reyes and Napa. San Francisco is a pretty pleasant big city to visit. There are lots of places to visit and it seems like a safe city to walk around, except the Tenderloin neighborhood. Perhaps, everyone on the street looks Chinese to me. There is certainly lots of awesome Chinese food in the Chinatown, which is the largest Chinatown in United States.

Talking about food, in one evening, we brought our parents to a sushi restaurant for dinner, and this restaurant has pretty good reviews from the online forums that I read. However, this is no ordinary sushi restaurant. Once we entered the restaurant, the loud heart thumping techno music blared through the speakers and invited us in. kind of my type of music. The waitresses wore Gothic-like black dresses while the TV showed some Japanese anime cartoon that I couldn’t comprehend. There were lots of Japanese figurines at the bar area, such as Ultraman, Godzilla and several unidentified Japanese cartoon hero figurines who love to wear an underwear outside. This sushi restaurant was jam packed with late 20s folks. In fact, our parents were probably the oldest three persons in the restaurant at that time. That being said, the sushi was awesome! It was also my first time trying out the seaweed salad, which was pretty good. As far as experience wise, it couldn’t get any more awkward than this. Our parents probably had the culture shock of their life and their blood pressures might have shot up by 20 points. Talk about trying to impress my future parents in laws, there, I totally blew it. bringing them to a techno sushi restaurant.

The drive from San Francisco to Yosemite NP wasn’t too bad. It was about 3.5 hours drive. We stopped by Wal-Mart in Oakland to do some groceries so that we can cook all our meals in the park. The view in Yosemite NP was just spectacular and breathtaking. We have been to several national parks, and this is probably the best national park scenic-wise. I would say my second most favorite national park is Olympic NP. In Yosemite NP, the El Capitan is simply an awe-inspiring sight. The largest granite monolith in the world made me feel so insignificant, small and powerless. I supposed that’s how an ant feels when it sees me stomping and going berserk around it. It rained several times during our park visit and when it rained, it poured. However, the rain never at all dampened my spirit and I usually carried on with my photo shoots because the SPF 50 made me feel waterproof, in fact, I was water resistant too.

While the Yosemite Falls is the highest waterfall in North America (and third highest in the world), I felt the Bridalveil Falls was much spectacular simply because its outlook point is much nearer to the waterfall. Thus, we could feel the strong waterfall mist blowing against us, which reminded me of the Niagara Falls (during the Maid of the Mist boat ride). In just a few seconds, my camera equipments and I were water drenched. Unlike my past experience, I placed several clothes and an extremely big Giotto rocket dust blower in my cargo pant’s pockets. Thankfully, no one thought I was about to blow up the waterfall.

During our park visit, my GPS screwed up one time again (Garmin – You’ve changed, mannn.. You used to be cool <sigh>). At one point, while heading back to the cabin, my GPS asked me to turn right. right into the Merced River. Surprisingly, there was also a gap between the wall barriers along the river. I could only imagine how many Garmin customers had driven into the river here. During our last day in the park, the park patrol pulled me aside and cautioned me for driving too closely to the vehicle. With the gas price at $4.71 per gallon in the park, the park ranger obviously didn’t know I was drafting to reduce the wind resistance, thus conserving the precious gas. The truth is I was following a tortoise with busted legs on a double-line lane for at least half hour. When I decided to overtake it on a single-line lane, the park patrol somehow appeared to be cruising right in front of me. Thankfully, the park ranger gave the poor rabbit a warning after the rabbit made the deer-caught-in-headlights look, like “Why blame the coffee-charged rabbit when the coffee-deprived tortoise is blocking its path?”.

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The Niagara Cave is a limestone cave, and its formation is different from the other caves we have been to in the past. This cave has many long and narrow passages… probably not suitable for claustrophobic visitors. In a few occasions, I could really feel the walls are closing on me… like the Indiana Jones’ movie, and unlike that movie, Harrison Ford didn’t come and rescue me. I also had trouble squeezing my tripod-mounted camera through certain narrow passages. Somehow, I made it through unscathed… even the Geico’s cavemen could do it. A few of these passages somewhat resemble the walls of the Antelope Canyon in Arizona… one of my many places to visit before I become more and more irrational. The Niagara Cave has very few stalactites, and I didn’t recall seeing any stalagmites… perhaps, I was blind as a bat(man) or maybe I wasn’t paying attention to the tour guide. 🙂 This cave has a 60-foot tall waterfall, albeit the fall’s view is somewhat obstructed. Further, there is no access the foot of the waterfall, unlike what I have seen in some photos.

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