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The housing woes seem to continue. I suppose woes is too strong a word as it's really not that bad. Our buy seems to be fairly straight forward - we got ready to go on that a while back - sorted the mortgage out and removed all the contingencies etc. etc. Really just waiting for the cash from our sale to seal the deal and move in.

The sale of this house has been problematic in the sense that our buyers struggled to get a loan (apparently due to the banks imposing more restrictions post the sub prime collapse, but I'm not really in a position to comment as we didn't see this ourselves) and then there seems to have been some confusion over the actual close date. We'd been working off the one in the contract which strangely is the right one. Anyway, it seems as if it's all worked out. The close date on the contract should be tomorrow on Monday and it looks like everything's going to work out on that date. So really it's getting exciting.

We were over to sign our documents on Saturday and decided to go out for one of our walks. For anyone interested, I'm using the Bay Area Hiker website to find these trails. It's a great site that gives you details on what to expect. So, why was I surprised when I ended up absolutely knackered after walking a trail for 1.7 miles with a 500ft elevation change? I don't think I actually realized what I was embarking on until it was too late.

The trail was at the Huckleberry Botanic Regional Preserve and is really nice. It's a path about a foot wide wandering through the thick wooded area of a hillside. Great trail to walk and we heard lots of birds, but unfortunately you couldn't really get any clear pictures as they were just jumping from branch to branch inside the trees. In fact I only managed to capture two birds.

Interestingly though, the first one is a Spotted Towhee - something I've not seen before. The second is an American Tobin which is very common.