Fun "Facts"

So I pulled this information from various websites and can't attest to the accuracy, etc but I just thought it was interesting to look at some figures to try and give you a "picture" of how many people are around and what this would mean for traffic, etc. Everyone knows there are lots of people and know traffic is bad but did you realize this:

California population approx 37.3M
Canada's population approx 34.5M

Size of California 414,000 sq. km
Size of Canada 9,093,507 sq. km
Size of Manitoba 649,947 sq km

so....

Picture cutting 1/3 of Manitoba off and moving all of Canada's population to the remaining 2/3 and you would have the State of California.

Crazy!

Even crazier... almost half the population (17.8M) live in the Greater Los Angeles Area.

Just crazy...

Ranunculus????

During my painting class the instructor mentioned this place south of Los Angeles where there are fields of flowers... so of course, I had to figure out where and when was the best time to view. Well, I figured out that about an hour and a half south of where I live is a place called "The Flower Fields", which is over 50 acres of Giant Tecolote Ranunculus, which can be viewed in early spring.

So I left fairly early on Saturday morning (Apr 28) and took the I-5 south. Drive went fairly smoothly - not a lot of traffic and got to the fields in about an hour and a half. It was pretty amazing to see the rows of colors...

The flowers belong to the buttercup family and feature a variety of shapes - some with tightly packed petals and others open, with only a few petals.

Besides the fields they had a hot house full of different varieties of poinsiettas - who knew there were so many.

There was a rose garden...

and a sweet pea maze

And then after many more photos, and a stop at the nearby outlet malls I headed north following the coast where I could.

And the hour and a half drive south turned into excess of 3 hours when heading north (until I got tired and headed back onto the free way for another hour of driving).