The lighter side of life – staying in touch with friends and family by celebrating the ordinary.
Visiting Laura (West Coast Van Trip – Post 10)
After Mendocino, the next stop was Santa Clara to see Laura and Alex! We enjoyed the drive down Hwy 101. We stopped for a picnic lunch near a river in Healdsburg.
The weather was perfect.
It was all quite nice until we reached San Francisco. I’ve never really been a fan of this famous city. The golden gate bridge looked like it usually looks.
Cold and foggy. (With bugs on the windshield, lol!)
The freeway dumps you out right in the middle of the city, which is really stupid. I have no idea why there isn’t a real freeway through San Francisco. There is an option to go around, across the Bay Bridge and through Berkeley and Oakland, a route which is invariably backed up. We always went that way when we lived in the East Bay, but this time, due to the fact that we were going south, and due to heavy traffic in Oakland, it was slightly faster to just wade through San Francisco at near-walking pace. Ugh!
I do love the Bay Area, getting anywhere is horrible. If I end up managing to live until I’m really old AND I can afford it, I can see myself as an old lady tucked away in quiet corner of the Bay Area enjoying the near-perfect weather (far enough inland to avoid the fog), spending my days sitting in a little courtyard with my daughter. But I wouldn’t be going anywhere. At least not without self-driving cars!
When Laura was a teenager and we lived north of Los Angeles together, we used to just bomb around LA, no problem. I got my first cell phone when I lived down there (I still have that number too…it’s the one I use for coaching). After my whole life of trying to follow paper maps each time I moved to a new city (which was about yearly), it was so amazing to be able to use a cell phone for navigating through LA. “Oh, looks like the 405 is slowing up, lets hop onto the 5 and then over to the 10…” (That’s how they say it in LA, they put the word “the” in front of the freeway number.)
Laura and I used to bop around on those freeways, no problem. Laura learned to drive out there! And in LA, they come to screeching halts on the freeways with NO WARNING. It always seemed to be much more sudden in LA than the continual but gradual slow-ups in the Bay Area, where you usually had some warning as traffic slowed. In LA, one minute traffic is going 85, the next minute it’s completely stopped. You really had to be on the ball and paying attention! Well, I still pay close attention, but my nerves aren’t up for it anymore. I’ll just stay home, thanks.
Anyway we made it safely to Laura’s house. Here we are the next day having lunch in Palo Alto. Laura and Alex really seem to fit in well in the Bay Area, bicycling around enjoying the cafes and working from home for the big-name companies out there.
It was all so very quintessential Bay Area.
The next night Laura and I and her friend, Melissa, met up in Pleasanton for dinner. I had been eating so much restaurant food recently that I literally did not want to eat. All I ordered was some plantains to go for John. It was a shame because it was a very good restaurant.
(No, it wasn’t Peet’s Coffee, it was a Mexican restaurant next door called Wild One Grill.) Many of these über expensive Bay Area towns have cute, walkable “downtown” areas with excellent restaurants and great patio seating. Nothing like the skyscrapers of big city downtowns.
Melissa is a rheumatologist, so we quizzed her on all sorts of questions because our entire family has autoimmune issues. We were total geeks, and pulled up our recent blood work results on our phones so Melissa could explain it all to us (John had to help me from back in the hotel and email my records to me, because my phone didn’t know how to access my records, but my computer back at the hotel did).
Melissa’s optimistic opinion was that because the weirdness in our blood work was similar, we’re probably both fine because it suggests that’s just “how we are” in our family. Well, that would be good. But after a recent, completely unexpected bout with cancer, I am highly aware that the unknown can be lurking undetected. And like any mom, I don’t want there to be anything wrong with my daughter!
It was really excellent to be able to see Laura again. We saw her in Boise and then in Santa Clara and then again in Pleasanton. It almost felt like we lived nearby and could casually see each other every week. Well, that would be nice!
The day after I left she sent me a picture of the first ripe fig on the tree in her backyard.
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