Sitting at the airport right now waiting for our first of two flights to get home. Yesterday we had a pretty easy day. With the winter advisory stil in effect for most of the parks, we didn’t feels safe going back for the last day. You could see the storms in the mountains from our accomodation. That morning, we made a big breakfast to try and use up as many groceries as we could. With that, we took a day trip to Fresno. We explored a Japanese Garden that was located in a park. This garden was serene and full of flora from it’s namesake. We saw an exhibition of bonsai, some over 1000 years old, some koi, and a few peacocks and peahens. Following the Japanese Garden we grabbed lunch and made our way to the Fresno Art Museum. They had a wonderful exhibit of uykio-e prints from the collection of the Georgia Museum of Art, go figure! They also had an exhibiton on trading cards, a secret war photographer, and Judy Wayne. Seem’s they have a thing for 2D work, more specifically printed work. The Wayne exhibition was especailly interesting with the use of negative imagry, lithography, and the type and color of paper she chose. The work was an exploration of her mother, a single working mom during the 40s and 50s, when that was unheard of. There I also spoke with two locals for quite some time who were very curious about what brought me to Fresno and what it’s like in Georgia. It was interesting to me that they think of Georgia as having a much higher crime rate than here in California. Following the museum we visited another garden, Covis Botanical, which is all volunteer run. This garden was very nice, especially to be completely run by volunteers. I sat for a while under a tree and jotted down thoughts and images. We left there, stopped through a shopping center, then headed back for the evening. We spent the evening going through the mass of pictures we collected over the last five days. A lot of happy pictures of happy people. We had a great time and made a lot of good memories together. You couldn’t have asked for a better trip with friends. Now I’m eager to visit more National Parks, we’ve got another trip planned in July for Congerie National Park. Maybe the Great Smokey Mountains is the thing to start planning.