2016 Main Street Arts Festival

Last week I took the TRE train and met Mom in downtown Fort Worth for the annual Main Street Arts Festival, which is always a lot of fun.  As usual, there was a lot to offer, but I couldn't afford to offer a lot for what there was.  :)

You can check out all the artists and examples of their works on the Main Street Arts Festival home page (linked above).

2016 Festival poster by Benjamin Frey (who has some amazing works on his website)
Photo from http://www.mainstreetartsfest.org

L.A. Trip - Day 2: Griffith Observatory

We got back to the hotel, got the car, and took a crazy drive up into the hills toward Griffith Observatory.  We approached from the Southeast and drove up a maze of narrow, twisted roads through neighborhoods of houses built along and into the hillside.  Somewhere up there was a trail where you could hike up to the observatory, but after about a 1/2 mile of driving past cars parked bumper to bumper (reducing the already narrow road to less than a lane), we found a place to turn around and headed back to the main Eastern road and just drove there.

Even so, we had quite a hike uphill from our parking space along the side of the road to the observatory.  We knew ahead of time that (like everything in L.A.) there is much less parking than what is needed, and with all the cars parked along the main road we didn't try to park in the tiny lot actually at the observatory.  Instead we found an empty space someone had just pulled out of and walked climbed the rest of the way up.

So that's a parking lot over on the right, and everything from there is uphill.  The observatory is left of center at the bottom.  There's an itty-bitty parking lot just north of the observatory.  Heading Northwest from the observatory parking lot, the closest spot we could find was on the side of the road about 1/4 of the way down the first road to the left (in the upper left corner).  Then we walked up the rest of the way.
Screenshot from Google Earth.  I did not skydive just to bring you this parking explanation.

Fancy a hike?  There are miles of trails around the observatory.

Colorado Trip - Day 2, Part 2

We next drove to the little (blink and you'll miss it) town of Goodland to stop for lunch.  An app Todd looked at said there was a good local restaurant there called On the Bricks, so that was our destination.

We pulled off at the Goodland exit and passed the town's one-and-only (I guess) tourist attraction - a giant reproduction of one of Vincent van Gogh's sunflower paintings.  Who knew?

Van G(r)oh