Mendocino Photo Road Trippin’: Photowalks meets Backroads

I recently spent six amazing days in the beautiful Northern California coastal village of Mendocino filming the latest episode of PhotowalksTV.

Mendocino, about a three hours drive from San Francisco, is a New England style village, chock full of historic victorian buildings, miles and miles of trails, unique rock formations, views from everywhere and great food.

I’ve billed this as a “very special” episode, since I re-trace steps my late father Jerry took in 1991 for an edition of his local San Francisco KRON TV show “Bay Area Backroads.”

Mendo, as they call it, was all new to me. I had never been there before. And both of us fell in love with the ability to walk all over town, the rocky cliffs, the nearby lighthouse and waterfall….I could go on and on.

In putting this edition of PhotowalksTV together, I was able to get a copy of the tapes from some of the old shows, (thank you Jeffrey Pierce!) had them digitized and got to planning. There was no way, based on the footage, to super-impose our images together in one frame.

But here’s what I could do: if Jerry walked down Main Street, I could go to the same street and walk down it 30 years later in the same spot.

Good for me in that Main Street doesn’t look that different.

However, the horse ranch he visited and favorite restaurant are long gone. What does remain is the natural beauty, which is a stunner.

I also have tapes from his episodes in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Mission District and North Beach, and they will be debuting, in that order, over the next Saturdays.

For the new series of shows, which are sponsored by our friends at Flipboard (thank you Mike McCue Marci McCue and Mia Quagliarello) it was time for a new theme song!

My pal Paul Ellis and I came up with the melody and chords. He played slide and I did rhythm and Paul’s friend Richard Keeler, Jr. produced it for us.

We also did all the background music you hear through the episode.

I shot all the B-roll on iPhones, GoPros and the DJI Mavic Air 2S. My wife Ruth was kind enough to shoot some of my stand-ups.

To see how I pulled off some of the photos on tiny mobile cameras, please visit and join the Flipboard Photowalkers magazine at this link: If you have any trouble getting through, just e-mail me: photowalksTV@gmail.com

Helen from the Blair House Inn (which doubled as Jessica Fletcher’s Murder, She Wrote home) and photographer Ken Van Der Wende were kind enough to be interviewed.

Please take a look and let me know what you think!