Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Photo tour stop 4: Fire!

Hello again! I hope you all are enjoying your little trip through my fair city! Today, we're taking a turn for the darker side of the series. Today I will show you the places that exist in the fourth book: Fire. (Just click on the pictures to see enlarged versions.)



In the beginning, Shay is atop a hill, overlooking Ventura. She's been meditating and desperately trying to glean any energy she can from the hillside. Atop this hill is a massive cross that marks the area where Spanish Monks used to reside. Here is that hill and the view.

You can see, people were getting married there that day. What a lovely place for a wedding.


And this is the view from the top of the hill:
Kind of appropriate that there was so much June Gloom that day. Since the book takes place in the winter, you get a better sense of what it should look like in the book


 A few more pretty views of the hill:


I wanted to give you some awesome shots of the coastline where Shayna tests out her new-found flying abilities to help in the car crash, but alas, there was so much construction going on, none of the shots were usable.

But, moving right along! We get to see the beautiful Majestic Ventura Theater:

The view from the balcony (I'm sure we all liked the balcony scene ;) ):
Photo credit: gothers.com


And finally, the entrance to The Tea Gardens. This is the place where I set the New Years Even scene and subsequently the fiery end of the book. 



Five years ago there actually was a horrible, horrible fire in this area. College kids had broken into the Tea Gardens (so named because this once belonged to Charlie Chaplan and he would take his tea in this part of the property), had a party and a fire and did not properly extinguish their fire before they left. A few days later, wind stirred the embers and set a catastrophic fire, burning 100 homes and injuring two people. It was heartbreaking. Because of my father's business (construction), we were very familiar with this area and knew many of the people effected. I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to see it doing so well now.

                         

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