Just Around The Corner..

I hadn't been out shooting in a while so, yesterday, I decided to throw the gear in the truck and go out shooting. I didn't have a plan. I didn't have a route, and I didn't have a destination. I figured I'd find out where I was going when I got there.

When I go out shooting around San Diego, I usually head west to the beach, or maybe to Old Town. There's always something good to shoot at either of those destinations. Every once in a great while, I'll head east into the mountains or the desert. Yesterday, though, I decided to head north on I-15. Normally, when I drive I-15 north, it's because I'm making a rare drive to Vegas. This time, though, I decided to go no further than the San Diego County line. In all honesty, I actually never got near it. I made it as far north as Escondido.

My first stop was at Lake Poway in, you guessed it, Poway. I'd never been there, and it seemed like the perfect place to start a trip like this one. To be frank, I don't know that I even knew that Lake Poway existed. it surely does, though, so up I went. Being a Saturday, the fields were filled with softball teams and soccer teams, but parking was plentiful. I parked the truck, grabbed my camera, and headed out.

After walking up a small hill, I saw the lake in front of me. It's not exactly what I expected to see. A portion of the lake seemed to be cordoned off by one of those oil booms you see laid out around some of the larger Navy ships down in San Diego Bay, but this seemed to only serve the purpose of keeping fishing boats out of a particular portion of the lake. And, while there were plenty of small rowboats on the lake, far more people were fishing from the banks:

Lake Poway...

Fishermen along the banks, lines in the water...

This guy's got it figured out...

A guy can only take so many pictures of so many people catching so many fish, so I decided to walk along one of the many trails surrounding the lake. As I'll often do, I just start takin' pictures of weird stuff.



Just diggin' the depth of field...



An infrared-ish view of the lake...



More depth of field yumminess...

After the lake, I decided to head further north into Escondido. Escondido is one of those towns where you wouldn't expect to find too many photo ops and, if you stay in the main part of the city, you might be right. However, if you venture out a bit further, you can find a lot.

About ten minutes north of the center of Escondido is the Belle Marie Winery. You can barely see it from the freeway but, if you take the time to find your way over to it, you'll be rewarded with a visit to a small, boutique winery. They make less than 5,000 cases of wine a year here. Now, while that sounds like a Helluva' lotta' wine to me, I guess, in the grand scheme of winedom, it's not much at all.

The coolest part of the winery is Chateau Dragoo, the castle on the winery grounds. I dunno', what would you call it?

One of the things you really notice here is the sweet smell inside the "barrel room". Again, they don't make huge quantities of wine here by industry standards, but there's still a lot of wine in these barrels:

Inside the barrel room...

This stuff has just GOTTA' be tasty...

Now, once you get past the barrel rooms, where all that wine is fermenting, you get to go inside for a taste. I didn't care to imbibe, but took more than a cursory look at their wine menu. It was extensive, and I'm sure this isn't the last time I'll be here. Hey, I need to pick up a bottle or three of Merlot.

A private tasting room at Belle Marie...

From the winery (did I mention the bitchin' wine list?), I decided to head south a bit, to Kit Carson Park in Escondido.

Kit Carson Park, for the most part, is pretty much like most other parks you'll find in the San Diego area. There are softball fields and frisbee gold courses, playgrounds and hiking trails. But there's a difference here. Kit Carson Park has something that no other park in San Diego County, or for that matter, anywhere, has.

Kit Carson Park has Queen Califia's Magical Circle, a sculpture garden created by Niki De St. Phalle. The land was donated by the City of Escondido, and the garden was opened in October 2003, about a year after St. Phalle's death at the age of 71. Nowhere have I been able to find just how long it took to construct, but the garden is made up of what has to be millions of stones, including turquoise, agate, hematite, tiger eye and quartz:

None of these stones is much bigger than a quarter...

Now, the photo above doesn't really convey the Herculian effort that must have gone into creating this garden. Here's a somewhat wider shot of the wall. Each of these snakes, which encompass approximately 400 feet of circumference along the wall, is made up of individually placed stones similar in size to the ones you see in the photo above:

Two of the several snakes atop the garden wall...

The main attraction, if there could be one over another, would be the actual sculptures contained within the walls of the garden. They defy description. And, while you can find St. Phalle's works elsewhere in the United States, these sculptures represent the only "garden" anywhere in the country. Her works can also be found all over the world.

Dig it:

I finally decided that it was time to point the truck south and start making my way home. I'd done a good deal of shooting, and certainly a good deal of editing ahead of me. But, more than that, I'd been shooting at three places I'd never been before.

The decision to drive north, as opposed to steering into my western comfort zone, paid off...

This is a cool QR code for my website which will now be added to my blog...