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| At the end of July we took a trip through California, mostly around the San Francisco region. Here are some blurry snapshots and a few scribbled notes and some broken links. Enjoy! :) |
| G:
I got in late on Friday
night, July 25th, and we went directly from the San Jose airport to the
Zuckershack in Berkeley. There, Eric and Beth greeted us along with
Mike Sugerbaker, Bob, and a bunch of other nice people. We hung around
and talked, played crazy eights with Eric's big deck, and a bleary-eyed
game of Werewolf. We left there around 2 in the morning and went back
to John's work hotel. I got to bed around 3am - that's 6am East Coast
time... |
| The next day after getting a slow start, we checked out of the hotel and drove into SF to meet my college pal D-Dave at a going away party for a friend of his who was leaving the next day to go intern at the Farm Sanctuary for 3 months. We had a good time, there was lots of hula hooping. We drove from there to D-Dave's home in Santa Cruz late that night. |
The next day we drove to Boulder
Creek to have breakfast at the Blue Sun cafe. We all had
scrambled tofu, hash browns, and multi-grain toast, which made us very
groggy for our hike once we got to Big
Basin, a state park of Giant
redwoods and Sequoias. After a cursory exploration of the headquarters,
museums and such, we took a trail that lead to some falls. I had
dressed too warmly, and was suffering greatly, until I decided to just
take off my thick long sleeved shirt and tie it around me like a halter
top. I had been dragging from the start until then - I felt so much
better. I also wet my head down to keep
cool at a camp site faucet we came across. We got to the unsubstantial
falls and rested there a while, then
started back on the paved road which was much easier going. We had a
lot of fun on the walk back, scaring each other with fake mountain lion
attacks and playing frisbee with John's hat.       We had a great dinner at a place called Dharma's, topped off with a delicious soy ice cream coffee shake made with ground coffee beans mixed right in. After we got home, I managed to drag John and D-Dave back out to go to the boardwalk, even though it was about 9pm. It turned out the boardwalk was a really big amusement center, with a huge arcade, shops, and RIDES. We bought tickets to ride the Giant Dipper, and were pleasantly surprised at the level of fun this medium sized coaster packed into it's dips. We also rode a thing that sort of simulated hang gliding, you lie on your stomach and it goes around in a circle and up and down. |
  The
Santa Cruz area is a vegan paradise. There were health food stores all
over the place, and restaurants that were all vegan or vegan friendly.
On Monday D-Dave went to work, but we met up with him for lunch at the Saturn Cafe. We
had Ariel with us, a friend of D-Dave and his
house mates. We drove D-Dave back to work on the UC Santa Cruz campus,
then back to his place, from which we walked around town. We found a
store called Game A Lot,
and of course had to go in and see if they were carrying anything
Looney. What'd'y'know, they had a few games -- Zendo, Chrononauts,
Fluxx, and our book titled Playing with Pyramids. The clerk, Danielle,
was very happy to meet us, and she's a big fan and a new Mad Lab
Rabbit. She also had really long hair. See? We checked out more cool stores and stuff, bought a couple of things - I got a clay dyed organic hemp t-shirt with a peace sign made of flowers printed on it. We came across this backwoods bluegrass band.       We took
Ariel to ride the Giant Dipper, she had never
ridden it
even though she had lived in Santa Cruz for 3 years! I tried
taking pictures with the digital camera while on the ride, and to my
surprise and delight, they came out really well! So here they are!             That night, after shopping for ingredients with D-Dave, we had a fabulous vegan pizza made with Follow Your Heart mozzarella. This is a new vegan cheese that MELTS and tastes great, and it was amazing to have pizza again. I also bought a tofu cream pie with blueberrys that was very rich and very good. |
Tuesday we left
Santa
Cruz and drove up Rt. 1 along the coast. It was a very pretty drive,
and I took most of these pictures from the moving car. The first two
are a beach where we stopped to use the restrooms.      We met Beth at her work place in SF, took these pictures from her office's balcony, went to lunch, left her for Chinatown, found the music store that sold dijeridoos, and contemplated buying one (for $800 - $1000, they sounded wonderful but we couldn't manage to splurge).    Eric met us shortly after we discovered a fabulous vegetarian Chinese food restaurant called Lucky Creation, where we stopped for a snack (fried wontons and "chicken" with cashews and broccoli). With Eric we revisited the didges, and found the Golden Gate fortune cookie factory. We walked into a small space stacked high with bags of fortune cookies - regular ones, not-folded ones, and mini not-folded disks. The not-folded ones are cookies that aren't flexible enough to fold when the worker peels them off the griddle, she tossed them into a barrel that we were allowed to sample from. She also charged 50 cents to take her photo. From there we walked to North Beach to meet Beth at the City Lights Bookstore. After some deliberation of what to do, we caught a cable car for a bit, then a bus to Haight street to a Mediterranean restaurant called Kam Zaman. The food there, like everywhere we ate, was great. |
 On
Wednesday while Beth and Eric toiled at their jobs, we went on our own
to part of Berkeley to try to eat lunch at Cha Ya, a vegan Japanese
place (with vegan sushi!).  Unfortunately they were only open for
dinner, so we
opted for the Cafe de la Paz, a Brazilian place, that was excellent. We
drove around the hills for a while, admiring the homes there and
finding a couple of parks, like the Berkeley
Rose Garden and Tilden
Regional Park. There we found a little educational farm and these
friendly black sheep. We went back to the Zuckershack to meet up with
Eric and he took us to Telegraph street for some shopping - we spent
most of the time in Amoeba music where we bought a pile of cds. We had very little time for Eric to try to show us some of the campus of UC Berkeley before we had to go pick up Beth and go to Cha Ya. Alas! There was a line to get into the tiny place, and we had plans to go to a show so we couldn't wait. Instead we went to Beth and Eric's favorite Thai place, Bangkok Thai, just a couple of blocks from their house, and the food we had was amazing. We drove over the Bay Bridge into SF for a show called Love and Taxes by Josh Kornbluth at the Magic Theater. Eric and Beth are fans of his work, have been to some of his other shows, and brought along a dvd copy of his movie, Haiku Tunnel, in hopes of getting it signed. We all enjoyed the show and it was easy enough to wait a little while after it was over and have Eric get his autograph. |
  Thursday, we left Berkeley for SF once again, took lunch at a raw food restaurant called Urban Forage, and made our way to the Exploratorium - a place that I'd heard many a folk say was one of their favorite places in SF, and now I know why. We only had about two hours there and it was only enough time to visit less than half of the exhibits. The outside has these absolutely amazing and beautiful structures.     From there we went to Khaled and Suzy's place in Redwood City, and they have a 5 month old baby named Hisham. They live in a townhouse that is so close to a man-made lake that sitting by the window it can seem like you are in a boat on the water! After much deliberation, we decided to order pizza for dinner, they knew a place that made a pizza with soy cheese, and it was really good. Khaled and Suzy had to work on Friday, so John and I drove into SF to visit Golden Gate Park. The Conservatory of Flowers was closed, so we walked around and found the Shakespeare Garden, and went to the Japanese Tea Garden. We didn't have much time before we headed back to meet the Shamis at home again. Instead of going out for dinner, Suzy cooked us a wonderful Egyptian dish of rice and lentils. We stayed up really late watching an Egyptian movie with English subtitles.     Saturday, out last day there, Khaled and Suzy made a really good Mediterranean breakfast, then Khaled drove us through the mountains behind Palo Alto.   We spent the afternoon walking around Palo Alto, had a delicious dinner at Zao, an Asian Fusion restaurant. I don't usually drink anything but water, but they had a cucumber cooler that sounded interesting so I tried it. It was sweet, like lemonade but with a fresh cucumber taste instead of lemon. We spend the evening at the Shami home working on a crossword puzzle, went to bed late, and got up really early to catch our plane. |