March 23, 2019. Southern California in bloom. Our daughter and friends drive us around, a week before the official festival when the roads will be more crowded.

In the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, parked cars line the road for a mile or so from the entrance and only cars with handicap parking permits are allowed up to the parking lots by the visitor’s center. A steady river of hikers flows along paved paths–stepping off into the flowers strictly forbidden. Off the reserve, it’s okay to walk into the fields for photos.

Fields of gold and purple, and areas with patches of all those colors, stop us (and lines of others) for photos. In the distance, a spot of sunlight among clouds turns a poppy field into smokeless flames, but a cloud shadow extinguishes it before I can focus my camera.

Joshua trees along the way are showing spikes of tight-packed, bell-shaped buds. In another few weeks they will open fully and we’ll have the first widespread Joshua tree bloom since 2008, but today the poppies are the eye-poppers.

The idea of “related posts” is good, but I’d better find out how to control them. The ones chosen, below, by this computer program, aren’t what I’d call “related” to blooming poppies!