We're on the tour!

Imagine the scene, bucolic reader: you're sat minding your own business on your porch, and a couple of people wander past, looking up at the trees outside the house and checking the address and house number. Now house numbering here is basically random, and you're a helpful soul, so of course you engage these bewildered newcomers in polite conversation, at an appropriate social distance of course.

"Can I help you? You look lost."

"Oh no, we're looking for 365 Hawthorne. These trees are on the tree walk."

"There's a TREE WALK???"

Revelation.

The Peninsula variously used to be home to orchards and other arboriculture, and there are trees lining all the streets here in Palo Alto. It's really rather pleasant, but so exciting to find that our house features on the Downtown North Tree Walk! Apparently, these are fine specimens of Red Maple:

What's more, this is the US, so there are no health and safety rules, and this is California, so there's no real concern about trees blowing over or messing up the foundations of your house. As such, you end up with a mighty redwood like this, either in the middle of the pavement (sidewalk for our American readers) or sometimes even in the road itself:

Obviously, having discovered the tree walk, we had to do the walk in which our place features, and also another nearby. It turns out there are plenty of such walks in Palo Alto. Stanford University, just across the railway line from here, has its own arboretum, and the lack of any significant storms here means that massively tall, relatively slight, and fast-growing trees from all over the globe thrive.

Of course, we've got some form with these town tours: when we lived in our rented house in Farnham back in 2010, I was disturbed from my reverie one Sunday morning by a tap on the window as our house was part of the town architecture tour! Here, we're not quite so architecturally significant, but clearly our Red Maples are worthy of further inspection.