Fall means leaves and, at least in the Northwest, it can also mean rain. The rain helps accelerate the dropping of the leaves, but it also does a nice job of making the colors look at their best. I was out at lunchtime and saw these leaves on the ground in the parking lot. I couldn’t walk by without taking a few shots.
A previous vacation to the UK had included a visit to Stourhead and, we liked it so much, we decided to go back on the latest trip. We went with a load of the family for lunch and then a walk around the grounds. The weather was lovely and there was a hint of the onset of fall in the foliage. The place is just gorgeous and wandering through the grounds on a sunny day with your family is hard to beat.
We visited Bothell to look at the trees as I mentioned in this previous post. We weren’t the only ones though. As we came around the corner, a row of the trees was very intense in their red colors and plenty of other people had come out to check this too. Families were all over the place taking pictures. The best place seemed to be in the middle of the road. Consequently, groups of people were standing there taking their shots and, hopefully, avoiding getting run down!
The area around where I work has a lot of trees and they have turned out to be the sort of trees that get very colorful in the fall. It is really nice to be able to look out of my window and see such vibrant colors when the sun pops out (which it does do in the Pacific Northwest sometimes). I had driven down the road in the opposite direction to normal one evening and saw even more color so, when the sun was out one weekend evening, we diverted to the area so I could get some shots.
The richness of the colors is sometimes hard to represent with photos. They don’t always have the impact that being there had but hopefully some of these shots will give you an idea of how pretty the street was.
Fall color is usually associated with trees. However, grape vines are also prone to some nice color changes through autumn and we took a ride up to Napa Valley to see how things were looking. We probably we there a little after the peak of the colors but there were still some nice colors to be seen. A good number of vines were already devoid of leaves but others had developed a strong red hue. Heading up to Calistoga, we could get up on the hillside and see the valley floor below us. The variation in the different fields helped to emphasize the colors more in my opinion.
It seems like a long time ago that we were in the transition from summer to winter. Fall in California is a little later than in some other places but, even so, it was still a while ago. We spent a day up in the wine country back then and the colors in the trees and the vines were very nice. I think we had missed the peak of the color for the vines but, as I was walking around Yountville, the sun was bringing out some great color in the trees.
Driving in to town we had passed a great variety of colors so I decided to walk back down through the town to take a closer look. Everywhere I looked there was another tree with the leaves glowing in the light. It was great. Whether looking along the road or up through the foliage, you couldn’t help but stare at the vibrancy of everything. It is cool to get good sun when the colors in the trees are nice too. Sometimes in the past I have struggled with getting the best of fall colors when the light became flat while the trees were at their best. Not so this time!
