Today’s my last day in the Bay Area, and I spent the afternoon tooling around on the bicycle, running errands for S., who is still recovering from surgery. I went to the drug store, the grocery for flowers, and then the bakery. Oh, the bakery. The daily special pizza. The chocolate things. The cheese rolls. All delicious. I miss the food round these parts, that’s for sure. I rode home via Lake Merritt to get one last look. It really is beautiful here. New Orleans is completely flat. There are no hills off in the distance, no changes in terrain. Lake Pontchartrain isn’t really a lake–it looks like the ocean, because it kind of is. Lake Merritt, though, is a lake’s lake, the largest brackish lake in an urban area in the country with a circumference of 3.4 miles. I snapped this picture of geese snoozing under a tree on the Grand Avenue side of the lake, because when I think of this place, I think of geese. They are everywhere. They are considered by many to be a nuisance because their droppings are everywhere and they can be really aggressive. On the other hand, Lake Merritt is a wildlife refuge, so perhaps they belong there, and people don’t. To act as if human activity has no effect on geese populations, though, is pretty disingenuous–the park is filled with people feeding that wildlife. Personally, I love the geese (especially the goslings and teen geese of spring and early summer), and again biking proves itself superior to other forms of transport. When I’m on the bike, my feet are pedals away from goose mess.