A quick summary of California

We made our annual visit to Ted in California last week. Let me start with a story about not judging people. On the flight home I developed one of my instant dislikes (some might say this is my default reaction to people - but I'm not quite that bad) for the guy in the seat in front of me. This guy was probably about 6' 3", and was carrying a gut large enough that it should have had its own seat. He was wearing an Arlington County Fire Department t-shirt, though honestly, I think the only way this guy could have contributed to putting out a fire was by smothering it with his belly. 

Why did I take a disliking to him? First, every time he sat down in his seat he caused the seat, and with it my tray table, to rock at the level of severe turbulence. Second, when it was time to "de-plane", apparently he had a bag in the overhead bin two rows back and he just shoved his way through everyone to get back to his bag - including nearly tackling me - without so much as an "excuse me". 

Anyway, after the flight we're all at the baggage claim. I was standing right where the conveyor belt burps up bags onto the baggage carousel. My bag came out right after another, and so was stacked above the preceding bag, which made it impossible for me to grab, particularly from my position at the end of the carousel. Fortunately, another passenger who saw me struggling reached out and helped me wrestle my bag free. What a good Samaritan. And yup, it was gut man from the seat in front of me. I am so ashamed of my misanthropic tendencies.

Anyway, California was, as always, warm, sunny, expensive, and required a lot of driving.

Another anecdote: I drink only decaf coffee, and the only decaf my son had in the house was the remnants of the bag I had bought when we visited a year ago. So, when upon arrival we went to the supermarket to buy a few things I started to pick up a bag of coffee but he assured me that we could get much, much better coffee at this cool coffee place in Palo Alto. Sure enough, the Blue Bottle Coffee in Palo Alto is very cool - co-located with a co-working space in a converted old movie theater with Moorish architecture. But my bag of coffee rang up for $23. I noted today that the very same Blue Bottle coffee was on sale at Target for $13 per bag, which is still more than I usually pay for coffee, but within the bounds of reason. It just goes to show you, Silicon Valley people have too much money and not enough sense - no matter what the price, if it's cool (or whatever word the kids use today to mean "cool"), there's no limit to what they'll pay for it.

Moorish courtyard at the Blue Bottle in Palo Alto

Anyway, we did a lot of fun activities while we were there:

- On Tuesday we arrived, got ramen at the fabulous Ramen Nagi, got ice cream at Salt and Straw, which has "I'll pay through the nose because it's cool" Silicon-Valley-cool flavors like Smoked Mac and Cheese, and Pear and Blue Cheese (I've got to admit, their ice cream is really good). We also took Ted's lizard Sierra for a walk in her special bubble backpack.

Walking Sierra the lizard

- On Wednesday Valerie and I tried pickleball. I will mention that in Arlington, pickleball courts are a rare and highly utilized commodity; they do not go empty, even for a minute. At Stanford, however, Ted was easily able to book us court time. Valerie actually took a fall running for a ball and wound up sitting a bunch of the session out. I showed myself to be not too embarrassing for a total novice. After recovering from the exertion, in the evening we sat on the sidelines and watched Ted play ultimate Frisbee.

Pickleball with Ted

- Thursday I started my day with a run (cool mornings! no humidity!), then we went out to Pleasanton California, a not-surprisingly pleasant little town with cute shops. Ted got us to eat at Zachary's, a Chicago-style pizza place. Let me just say, Chicago-style goopy cheesy casserole is not pizza (Jon Stewart agrees with me on this one), but it was still good. Ted and I also took time to find an underground geocache while Valerie (the most sane of us, at least when it comes to crawling through tunnels for fun) waited nearby. And, we got soft-serve at some famous place where again, people line up to get ice cream. Fortunately, mid-day on a weekday there was no line, which was good, because the ice cream wasn't anything special. This was the second of a total of three ice cream desserts I got during the week - which is insane compared with my normal eating habits, but oh, well.

As if pickleball and Pleasanton weren't enough (and sufficiently alliterative), that evening Ted and his housemates hosted a paint night. An art teacher Frisbee friend of Ted's led us all through painting a night-time scene. To feed and lubricate the attendees we supplied a weird selection of stuff from Total Wine (Sunny-D coolers, Manischevitz) and got Indian pizza, a weird cross-breed consisting of pizza with Indian toppings.

My run took me past Levi's Stadium, site of next year's Superbowl

Awaiting our cheesy, gooey casserole

Geocaching

Paint Night results

- Friday Ted and I started the day with an eBike ride on local trails, then the three of us went out for coffee and pastries and yet another impossibly hip Silicon Valley place (The Midwife and the Baker). We played another round of pickleball on again shockingly uncrowded public courts in Mountain View, and in the evening Ted treated us to homemade hot pot. I liked it; Valerie was lukewarm on the hot pot.

Bike trail

Cyclist selfie

Cool pastries

Hot pot

There's a lot of property crime in the area - note two signs warning you about car break-ins.

- Saturday and Sunday we made a little overnight trip up north. Saturday, after stopping in Berkeley to have coffee at the very first Peet's Coffee (and eating lunch at an outdoor table while a mentally ill man screamed at us through the whole meal - typical Berkeley, apparently), we headed north for the Cotati Accordion Festival, an event which has been on my bucket list since I discovered its existence. Multiple stages of accordion music! A dedicated polka tent! Accordion merch! It was almost too good to be true.

At the original Peet's Coffee

At the accordion festival

Zydeco dancing

Open air accordion market. Perhaps this is the kind of thing Donald Trump means
when he says San Francisco is "not livable"

After a Mexican dinner we retired to a hotel in Petaluma, an unusually cool Hampton Inn housed in a vintage silk mill building.

- Sunday we got up and made the twisty, winding drive (Valerie wasn't happy) to Muir Woods, where we marveled at the giant redwoods. On the way back to Ted's place he insisted on taking us to eat at a burrito joint in the Mission District. He felt that the Mexican place where we had eaten in Cotati wasn't real Mexican and he wanted us to experience the genuine article (non-Latino Virginian transplant Ted feeling that he is an arbiter of true Mexican food reminded me of Street Eats). Getting to this place and then waiting in their foolishly long line took a bunch of time, and the burrito wasn't really anything special. I must admit that my opinion may be influenced by the fact that they had given me the wrong burrito, and I couldn't go back and fix the order since we had gotten the food to go. Where did we eat our burrites? Well, there was no nearby park or anything so we wound up getting sodas at a McDonald's - a branch of the chain which, like everything in the immediate area, was dominated by the mentally ill and unhoused! - and eating our burritos on the sly there.

At Muir Woods

Muir Woods

Muir Woods

Some big trees!

- Then, Monday morning we headed home on the flight with fireman big-gut, about whom I've already written.

A fun and action-packed visit. Always great to spend time with Ted!

California - Part 2

 

7/9/21

Friday was another outdoor adventure day and followed pretty much the same contours as the previous day, except that Valerie opted out of the physical exertion. Prior to the trip I had planned on hiking at Point Reyes National Seashore (which Ted had previously visited and found quite beautiful), but as with Monterey, once we got to California I decided to cut down on the driving time and opt for something closer to "home". I think I might have felt differently if we had rented a car and were doing some of the driving, but we were relying on Ted and his aging two door Honda Civic for all our transportation, and I really didn't want to make too many demands on him as our chauffer. So Ted and I decided instead to hike at Ed Levin Park in Milpitas, not far, as it happens, from where we had rented kayaks the day before. On our way out we dropped Valerie at the Stanford Shopping Center - she was happy to spend the day hiking the mall while we hiked the mountains. After dropping her off we headed for Ed Levin, in the foothills of the Diablo Mountains. I smiled at the incongruous park name - in a place where just about everything is named in Spanish after some saint or other (San this and Santa that), this park, named after a former Santa Clara county supervisor, had a very Jewish-sounding name.

At Point Reyes we would have been treated to lush ocean scenery, but the Diablo Mountains are dry and desert-like. The Tularcitos Trail looked like someplace where ill-fated settlers would be found crawling on all fours, gasping for "water! water!" before collapsing into the dust. After reviewing the warning signs (rattlesnakes!! mountain lions!!), we headed up the trail. The trail was pretty vertical and it was an unusually hot day by Bay Area standards (well above 80 degrees), so we took it slowly. As my initial shock at the barrenness of the landscape wore off, I began to see the beauty of the desert setting. Ted, needless to say, had researched the geocaches in the park ahead of time and we paused here and there to find caches as we hiked. Geocaches were pretty easy to find in this environment: when you're hiking through low scrubby grass and suddenly come upon a lone tree, and your app tells you that there's a geocache in the area, chances are it's in that tree. That's a lot easier than caching in the woods of the northeast - though, given the rattlesnake warning, I was unwilling to stick my hand into little crevices searching for geocaches.

Ed Levin Park is also known as a hang-gliding spot and we got to see some hang-gliders (they may have been para-gliders?) as we hiked. We went far enough up that they were launching below us, and from our high elevation we got some pretty views of the valley below.

Another reason I wanted to hike close to home base was the big secret of the trip - that we had arranged a surprise birthday party for Ted! Well before the trip, Valerie had the idea of trying to pull off a surprise party. I contributed by finding contact information for Ted's work friend Audris. Valerie reached out to her and the two of them did the rest. We arrived at the restaurant, supposedly for with a reservation for just the three of us - but when we got there about half a dozen of his work friends and other friends were waiting for us. We had a great dinner, Ted got presents, and thanks to Audris, there was even cake! Ted was genuinely surprised.

7/10/21

This was Ted's actual birthday. I decided to step back and not be prescriptive about activities on Ted's actual birthday - particularly since I had planned the previous two days and had also already made plans for the following day. As a result we got a slow start to the day and eventually defaulted to going over to the nearby IKEA to browse around. Now, I find the idea of going to a national chain store as a vacation activity to be FÜKIHN KRÅYZEE (or maybe that was the name of one of the IKEA sofas we looked at?), but we went - and to tell you the truth, we had fun just because it was great spending time together. We even tried on (and Ted bought!) hats made of the signature IKEA blue bag material, and of course we ate at the IKEA restaurant, which offered two different varieties of veggie meatballs (the curry ones were really good, BTW). 

Lunch at IKEA

Stylish hats

On the way home we stopped to take pictures at the crow statues in Palo Alto. These are an installation by artist Sylvi Herrick, I believe at her residence. Previously, Ted had said that you have to sneak onto someone's property to see them, but they are on the front lawn and after looking at the artist's web site I believe they are meant to be interacted with by the public. Having had a couple of busy days, we took this one a little slower and after the crows we went back to Ted's to relax for a bit. 

For dinner we went out to Ted's other restaurant choice, Doppio Zero in Mountain View. We headed to Mountain View a little early and spent some time browsing the shops on Castro Street, then at the time of our reservation (reservations recommended - all the restaurants are quite busy, like the pandemic never happened, or is totally over) we headed to the restaurant and were seated at a pleasant table outside. I must say, the food was excellent - one of the best pieces of salmon I've ever had - though the service left a little to be desired. Our waiter was a harried guy from New York (we could tell by his accent and attitude). He never took our drink orders, and in general seemed too busy to waste time on things like waiting on his tables. He did, however, take the time to tell us about all the important positions he had held in New York restaurants.

Robots are everywhere - including delivering food on Castro St.

After dinner we took a sunset stroll through Baylands Park and visited Ted's office, which was of course deserted on a Saturday night. Since most everyone has been working remotely for the past year, the place has an abandoned sort of vibe to it, as I imagine many offices do these days. Then it was back home.

Sunset at Baylands

7/11/21

I always love seeing live music, and thanks to playing in Great Northern I've gotten back into the world of the Grateful Dead, so when we started planning our trip I looked up what, if anything, was scheduled at Terrapin Crossroads, a small music venue in San Rafael owned by Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh. Sure enough, they were just opening post-pandemic and Melvin Seals and JGB (a carrying on of Jerry Garcia's side project, the Jerry Garcia Band) were playing a two day engagement during our stay. I grabbed tickets to what I knew would be a sold out show. Our plan for the afternoon was to head up to San Rafael for the concert, but first ... more Frisbee.

Ted had described Sunday morning Frisbee as a laid back, Sunday in the park feel, which was indeed the case. After a good pancake breakfast at home we headed out and set up under a tree to watch all the young tech bros (and a couple of tech women) through the Frisbee around. Throughout the trip I was concerned about my lack of opportunities for daily exercise (Ted's neighborhood is just skeevy enough that I didn't feel really comfortable going out for early morning runs there) and so once again I took a walk while Ted played. I came back to find Valerie interrogating the players during a break. After Frisbee we stopped to grab sandwiches (Erik's this time - the Bay area has some great sandwiches!) for lunch and headed back to Ted's place so he could get cleaned up. Then we drove up to San Rafael.

Upon arrival at Terrapin Crossroads we were met with quite a hippie scene - sort of like the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert in miniature. As I expected, the crowd inside was more of a normal bunch, but the folks hanging out were hippie flotsam and jetsam, either selling stuff (tie-dyes and the like) or maybe just hanging out outside to hear the music for free. This show was outdoors on the "beach", which is genuinely waterfront, if not a true beach (the venue has an indoor stage as well). Lots of people, sunshine, palm trees, good vibes. Several people with whom I chatted mentioned that this was the first live music they'd seen since the beginning of the pandemic, making me all the more appreciative of the way venues in the DC area (particularly right in Falls Church) managed to keep music going throughout COVID with socially distanced outdoor shows.

Grateful Dead themed motorcycle outside of Terrapin Crossroads

Melvin Seals and JGB at Terrapin Crossroads

At one point I heard people behind me talking about New York. I turned around and recognized well-known Grateful Dead photographer Bob Minkin, who I sort of have a connection with. He's from Brooklyn and is childhood friends with a couple of musicians with whom I used to play in New York. I introduced myself and we chatted for a bit. I also spoke with a woman named Alicia who owns the store Land of the Sun in Haight Ashbury. It was funny - at first was a little hesitant to tell her we'd been to the Haight since it seemed like a cliché touristy to have done, but then it turned out she owned a shop there :) It was another hot day and Valerie took shelter in the shade and wound up chatting with a woman who, while she had lived in the Bay area for years, had spent part of her childhood just around the corner from Valerie's childhood home. Weird. It was a good show, though I spent much of it worrying that Ted and Valerie weren't having a good time because (a) it wasn't their kind of music, and (b) it was hot out. We left just before the last song to beat the crowds out.

We had driven up the East Bay side to get to San Rafael, but on the way home we drove through the city so we could stop at Toy Boat Dessert Café. The first trip Valerie and I took together when we were dating was to San Francisco. On our last night in town, while killing time before our flight home, we wandered into a neighborhood dessert place in the Richmond District called Toy Boat. We were feeling the magic of new love and ever since Toy Boat has been special to us - we try to visit whenever the family or subset thereof is in SF. The restaurant almost closed during the pandemic, but fortunately was rescued by another local restauranteur (it's now Toy Boat By Jane). We all got ice cream (a real treat to get ice cream for the second time in a week - since we're all normally watching our diets for one reason or another) and of course, took pictures. Then we went over to Chinatown and ate dinner at a vegetarian Chinese restaurant (ha ha - I'm turning them all into veggie eaters), which was quite good. After another eventful day, we headed home to Ted's place, a little sad that we had only one more day all together.

Toy Boat 2010 with David

Toy Boat, 2001

Inside Toy Boat, 2021