Today was my last full day of getting to be with my daughter before returning to work from my maternity leave. To make the most of the day, we fulfilled an item on my bucket list: to get dessert at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay. Before getting dessert, we walked along the public-access coastside trail, which can be accessed for free from the hotel.

San Bruno Mountain Park is run jointly by the San Mateo County and California State park systems. I took my most challenging hike since giving birth at this park, and I loved it!

A wonderful trip in which I took my family to three of the parks that I have been enjoying the most in the recent weeks.

This was a short and sweet 2-mile hike in Foothills Park in Palo Alto.

Portola Redwood State Park is a lovely state park not far from Silicon Valley. I used to live much closer to it when I lived in La Honda, but now it's about a 30-40 minute drive up into the Santa Cruz Mountains. Baby girl and I made the trip this afternoon, and it was so lovely to be back in the redwoods!

Today I went back to a favorite park of mine--Huddart County Park--in Woodside. I took a short and sweet 1.4 mile trail (in-and-out 0.7 miles each way).

Shoreline Park and Stevens Creek Shoreline Nature Study Area are adjacent parks near the Google campus in Mountain View. The parks don't comprise a large area, so you can hike a pretty large percentage of the park in one visit.

Coyote Hills Regional Park is a 1,266-acres park comprised of marshland and rolling grassland covered hills. It is near the towns of Fremont and Newark, just off of the Dumbarton Bridge on highway 84. It is a gorgeous park, and I am kicking myself that I was so slow to visit it! I thought that it would be too noisy from the traffic noise, which was what I thought of Ravenswood Open Space Preserve, on the west side of the bay. But a huge part of the park is pretty far removed from Highway 84, so your experience is a tranquil one.

The park does charge an entrance fee of $5, but you get a lot of bang for your buck. The 3-mile loop that I did had three main attractions to it: 1) the butterflies at the Nectar Garden near the Visitor's Center, 2) the panoramic views of San Francisco Bay from the hilltops of the park, which overlook the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, and 3) the marshes teeming with birds and rich with history--the site of a 2,000-year old Ohlone village.

Read more to see pictures from each section of the hike along with a map of the route I took.

This was a return visit for me to Lands End, part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Last time I was here, I walked along the Coastal Trail to the Eagles Point Overlook and back.  This time, my friends and I walked past Mile Rock Overlook to Mile Rock Beach and Lands End Point and back. Then we explored the ruins of the Sutro Baths and had lunch at the Cliff House.

The Pulgas Water Temple was constructed in 1934 after the completion of the aqueduct that brought water from Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite all the way to the San Francisco Bay Area. It is now part of the Crystal Springs Regional Trail, and can be accessed easily off of Cañada Road.