In April, John had to go out to Albuquerque for two weeks and I didn’t go because I had too much going on in Tucson. Originally he was going to take a 4-day weekend and drive back to Tucson for the long weekend before heading back to Albuquerque for the second week. But then he had meetings added to his schedule, and it didn’t make sense for him to drive that far for a shorter weekend. That’s when I suggested we meet halfway and go camping!
The area John ended up picking was much closer to Tucson than Albuquerque, but it was somewhere we had been meaning to check out; the Chiricahua mountains! That’s pronounced Cheer-uh-caw-wa, with the accent on the caw.
I know, I know, I should learn to write out pronunciation with the actual official way of designating the sounds. But not only would I have to learn the what symbols are for what sounds, I would also have to learn how to write all those marks over the vowels on my keyboard. And no one is paying me for this blog, so nope, not doing it. That’s the joy of being a volunteer. If my readers don’t like it, I can be like (shrug) Don’t read it then.
We met in Willcox, AZ, which was our turnoff from the freeway, and I followed him south into the Chiricahua. We turned onto washboard gravel roads and bumped along. After a few miles we passed a pretty little area with campsites.
But we kept going. We climbed and climbed. Pretty soon we were in a burned area, bleak and eroding. I was faithfully following behind John, eating his dust and wondering when the heck are we going to stop? Where the heck are we going?
I finally decided to just stop and hope that he notices, except there was nowhere to stop on the steep and windy road. Plus, John was a ways ahead of me, and I knew if I stopped, by the time he noticed he would be unable to turn around. What to do? We had no cell tower so I couldn’t just call him. I honked but he didn’t hear it. I started trying to drive with my turn signal on, but every time we went around a curve, it automatically clicked off again. I kept putting it back on. But it was hard for him to see me clearly in his rearview mirror due to all the dust the vehicles were kicking up.
John finally figured out I wanted us to pull over and we found a nice wide area to do do. Whew. I was so relieved to be stopped. But John misunderstood and thought I was just freaked out from having to drive the second vehicle. So he suggested we leave the pickup truck in the parking spot and go on together in the van. I climbed into the passenger seat, too dazed to argue.
We started going again, this time with me in the passenger seat, but I was no better. In fact, I was worse. I was actually more comfortable as the driver than as the passenger. I didn’t like the curves and the steep drop off, and I didn’t like the burned, bleak forest and signs of recent erosion.
Sometimes that happens to me when I’m overwhelmed. I don’t clearly understand what is wrong and what I need to happen to fix it. John made a very good guess – that I was tired of driving – but it turns out we were wrong. The problem was I didn’t want to be up there at all, but I wasn’t coherent enough to even realize it myself.
We reached a saddle (the top of a ridge but not the top of the mountain), and pulled over to decide what to do. It was crazy but I was still willing to go on. I do not like being the one to disrupt other people’s plans even when I’m miserable. And I often don’t recognize when it’s time to call it quits when I’m feeling overwhelmed. I find myself unable to make decisions, such as whether to go on or whether to go back. It was John who realized we needed to go back.
So back down the mountain we went, collecting the pickup truck on our way, and continuing down to the camping area we had passed on our way in. It was dispersed camping, not an actual official campground. There were no amenities except fire rings built by campers themselves. This was fine with us. Our van is fully contained and we don’t need any amenities.
Surprisingly, there were numerous sites available. This was particularly surprising because there was a little creek. Creeks in the desert are usually quite crowded. They are a rarity!
Plus, extra bonus, it was at the trailhead of very nice trail. It’s usually very difficult to find a place to van camp anywhere near a good trailhead.
We parked and walked around, surveying the sites looking for one that was set apart enough to be able to let Biska off her leash without her running into the next campground looking for playmates. Biska is an extremely friendly dog and will not mind her own business and leave people alone!
We found the perfect spot, bound on two sides by a U-curve of the road and on the third side by the little creek. Only one problem – we weren’t going to be able to get the van down there. The branches were way too low for our 9′ tall van.
We debated what to do. We didn’t have a tent or anything with us – we were dependent on the van. We finally decided to leave the van in the small pull-out area for the trailhead across the road. The van was only couple hundred feet from our campsite. We set up our chairs and hammock at the campsite and just walked to the van when we needed to.
Usually we had the parking area to ourselves anyway, or maybe shared with one vehicle. It turned out to be a rarely-used trail. It wasn’t like some trailheads that are grand central station all day long on the weekends.
And that’s how we got an excellent campsite, for free, on a creek, at a trailhead. Unbelievable!
Not only that, the weather was perfect. On the way out, we had high winds on the freeway. Our extra-tall van in particular (which I was driving), was getting hit hard by the wind, creating a difficult driving situation. I was afraid it was going to be miserable camping in all that wind. But the campsites in the Chiricahua were sheltered and we weren’t bothered at all by the winds blowing across the desert plains.
We hiked up the road, and hiked on the trail, and swung on the hammock and had an excellent weekend.
Here’s a mine entrance just up the road:
Views from hiking:
Biska did great – except she tries to eat crap she finds in the woods. I don’t know what all she was trying to eat, but I can guarantee you it’s not food. As we walked along, John and I deep in conversation about our upcoming remodel project, our discussion was frequently punctuated with “Biska! Don’t eat that! Yuck! No!”
At the end of the weekend I headed west back to Tucson and John went east back to Albuquerque, both of us battling the high winds all the way home. It was worth it.
Time to head home! It had been 24 hours since the storm, and the sandy roads out of Las Conchas were finally passible. Whew! We stopped in Puerto Peñasco to get gas. Many of the roads were flooded, and we had to work our way through town turning whenever we encountered impassible roads.
While John pumped gas, I took a video of everyone driving through a flooded intersection. The video is complete with Mexican music, coming from somewhere nearby.
Eventually, of course, one of the cars didn’t make it and got stuck in the water.
At that point, people started driving down the left hand side of the road instead. So that’s what we did too.
It was only a block before we could get back to the right side of the road!
The talking you hear in this video is our navigation system. Our cheerful navigation narrator did not realize we were on the wrong side of the road, or maybe she would have had something to say about that, lol.
Whew, we made it out of town. Next hurdle – we had to make it across the border.
We got as far as Sonoyta before things got interesting. Sonoyta is right along the border on the Mexican side. We were almost to the crossing when – John got pulled over by a police car.
I really, really wanted to take a picture for this blog, but I figured that might irritate them, so I refrained.
The policeman walked up to the van and told us he had pulled us over for speeding. Believe me, we weren’t speeding. Yes, we know the difference between mph and kph. John’s a scientist for pete’s sake. John even takes into account the fact that our extra large tires make our speedometer read slightly lower than our actual speed. We had it handled. We weren’t speeding.
Nonetheless, there we were, along the side of the road, being accused of being over the speed limit by 21 kph. The policeman wanted 3,000 pesos, which is about $160 US, and threatened us with writing up a ticket. He told us we would then have to take the ticket somewhere (it was a little unclear where), and pay in cash. It had to be paid in cash. Well, we didn’t have that much cash. We wondered what would happen if we took the ticket, ignored it, and just drove home?
John told the policeman that we didn’t have that much cash. The policeman then asked how much we had. John emptied his wallet. $75 in US dollars. The policeman took that, and then wanted to know how much I had. Usually I keep $10 in my phone case, along with my driver’s license and a credit card. I searched my phone case, but couldn’t locate the $10. I was quite surprised I couldn’t find it and kept looking and looking. I searched and searched with increasing puzzlement and frenzy – I think it must have looked like I was a bad actor, comically overdoing my search! But honestly I don’t know what happened to that $10 I thought I had.
I also had $100 or so in a piece of luggage somewhere else in the van, but I didn’t mention that. How would they know? Unless they had a cash-sniffing dog.
In the end, he took John’s $75 and let us go without a ticket. Now we can add “bribed a Mexican policeman” to our bucket list of crazy things we’ve been doing lately. That’s even worse than driving on the wrong side of the road in Mexico!
Lessons learned: don’t carry very much cash in your wallet while in Mexico. Carry any additionally needed cash hidden somewhere else.
Also we plan to research what would happen if we were to totally blow off a ticket and try to drive home without paying for it. We don’t want to end up in Mexican jail, lol. Because, yeah, of course we’re going back. It was a great trip!
The actual border crossing back into the US only took a moment. The border guard looked at our passports and waved us through. They didn’t even glance into the van. We could have been bringing anything and everything back into the US with us! Everything except cash in John’s wallet, lol.
The next morning the surf was rougher and we could see rain coming
It soon got darker.
And started to rain.
And rain, and rain!
Water flowed into the parking lot.
Pretty soon, water was flowing into our hotel room too! Water was coming in under both the front door, and the sliding glass door to the patio! Déjà vu! Just like back home in Tucson. It’s my karma. Except this time it was quite a lot of water, not just a little piddling puddle. We were wringing out the bath towels into a plastic trash can.
There was also quite a lot of erosion, with flowing sand and mud.
This wasn’t our unit, this was the big fancy middle one. It comes with its own moat.
The whole place was empty. It was mid-week and we were the only ones there. The fact that we were completely on our own made it seem more surreal.
Water ponded in the parking lot and then flowed out the other side and down the hill. The water was never deep, just a lot of mud.
Mud, mud, mud! My favorite!
Mud and gullies through the sand.
Everything just seemed so precarious. Those fancy beach houses and vacation rentals are built on a sand bluff.
Access is along sand roads which were liquifying. What wasn’t inundated was loose and deep.
When we messaged the hotel manager that water was coming in under the door, she tried to come out, but the roads weren’t passible. We were able to text her that we were fine before our internet and our cell tower went out. Luckily we still had power most of the time. It came on and off.
We didn’t worry too much. We had plenty of food and nowhere we needed to be. If we lost power for a significant length of time we could put our perishable food back into the van cooler, which runs off the solar panels on top of the van, and a huge bank of batteries under the bed. Our van had power, even if the hotel didn’t.
It was a little bit uncomfortably hot and muggy whenever the A/C switched off, which just added to the sense of tropics. Tropics within driving distance, right here in the desert!
By afternoon it was clearing up but still windy. Here’s a bunch of birds all facing into the wind.
The next day the waves were a little bit rougher than we felt like dealing with, plus there were nearby storms on the horizon, so we decided not to go kayaking again. We just sat on the beach and played in the water.
We had brought enough food to last us our full 5 days in Mexico if necessary (you never know, with this pandemic and everything), but by the end of the third day we had eaten all our favorite items and decided it was time to go into town to check out the restaurants. We were only a few minutes drive out of Puerto Peñasco, so it’s not like it was any trouble.
The restaurants were all seating indoors only – apparently it was considered too hot to offer patio seating. Even the restaurants that had patios were not using them. So we opted for take-out.
I didn’t take a picture of the bakery where we got breakfast. It was just a small corner building in a mostly residential area. Sandy dirt streets, a few people and stray dogs milling around. The bakery was popular and had a short line of people sitting inside waiting for a table. We chose to stand outside, which was so unusual that they forgot about us! Luckily they were able to locate our food after we came back in to inquire.
Language was never an issue for us. We know a small, halting, smattering of Spanish, enough to get food, but most of the service workers in Puerto Pañasco are bilingual. Their English is better than our Spanish.
In addition to breakfast, we bought a little birthday cake.
Later that day we went to a different restaurant to get an early dinner. Again, they expected us to eat inside, or at least wait inside for our take-out. And again, we decided to wait outside instead. But there really wasn’t anywhere to wait outside, so we ended up standing in a rundown parking lot across the street from the restaurant with nowhere to sit while we waited. It was not scenic. And it was hot!
It’s hard to believe there’s a nice restaurant there, but there is. The restaurant was beautiful inside, with views of the harbor, and I really would have liked to have sat and eaten inside in the air conditioning, looking out the window at the bay. But we don’t want to risk getting covid.
Our vaccinations would presumably help keep an infection from getting bad, but I don’t even want a mild version of covid. I’m having some sort of low white blood cell, immune or autoimmune issue right now and I don’t want to stress my immune system. My immune system is busy already – it’s supposed to be doing any final cancer mop-up that’s needed after last year’s ordeal. It doesn’t need to be fighting off covid on top of it, even with the vaccination to help give it an edge up.
The food was excellent, once we got it home. Here we are sitting down to eat on our own patio instead of in the restaurant. We had our own great view!
Here’s a boring but relaxing video of waves:
Here’s a cool video of a crab:
Another sunset selfie!
Another beautiful day in Puerto Peñasco! But not for long…
On our first morning in Mexico it was crazy windy.
No kayaking today!
We joked that the storm had followed us from Tucson, because Puerto Peñasco was the only place in all of the southwest US and Northwest Mexico that had storm activity!
Soon the storm quieted down and we enjoyed a quiet day, sitting on the patio and walking the beach. You would never have known a storm went through.
The next morning was completely calm. And absolutely gorgeous.
John saw on the weather forecast that more storms were approaching over the next couple of days, so we realized it was now or never if we wanted to put the kayak in the water. So after having our coffee, we got the kayak out and pumped it up.
We didn’t have any trouble navigating the kayak over the few low breaking waves. What a perfect morning! Here’s a view of our hotel (on the left) from the water.
We decided to head east, toward that condo in the distance.
The beach runs east-west rather than north-south, which was a bit disorienting in that we kept saying the wrong directional. But obviously, we weren’t going to get lost, lol.
Kayak selfie!
Heading back now. Beautiful water.
Landing was easy.
No, I don’t know where John’s going.
I think he thought that he was going to wash the sand off his feet? Like that was going to do any good. Because…then what? Sprout winds and fly to the hotel? There was actually an outdoor faucet to wash your feet at the bottom of the staircase that went up to the hotel – conveniently placed after you finished walking through the sand 😉
We stuck the kayak on our balcony in case we wanted to go out again, but the wind was picking up and the forecast was iffy. The rest of the day we pretty much just hung out and enjoyed not doing much.
John went swimming with flippers and snorkel gear. (I only swim in backyard swimming pools, lol.)
One time John said, “You look like a lion. Give me your camera.” Huh? LOL. The onshore breeze was picking up.
This dragon made me think of Callan. Or maybe it’s a sea serpent.
Sunset selfie!
What a beautiful spot. But our Mexico adventure was not over!
A couple of months ago a friend of mine posted some very beguiling pictures of an empty beach in San Filipe, Mexico, along the Gulf of California, where he had driven from Albuquerque. We considered going to San Filipe, but then we thought, why not just go to Puerto Peñasco, on the north edge of the Gulf of California? It was considerably closer. In fact it was ridiculously close; only a 4 hour drive from Tucson!
Puerto Peñasco, also known in the US as Rocky Point, doesn’t rank all that high on most lists of where to go in Mexico. It’s just a small spot of tourist accommodations in middle of absolutely nowhere, where flat, empty desert sands meet the gulf. Rocky Point caters to spring breakers driving down from Phoenix to party.
No historic architecture, no authentic Mexican culture, nothing much to recommend it except – hello, it’s a beach and it’s only 4 hours from where I live! A beach!
So the morning of my birthday, we loaded our van with plenty of fresh water and lots of food, and headed southwest to the beach.
Here we are approaching the border crossing. We timed it to arrive mid-morning to avoid a long wait. There were only a few cars in front of us.
Crossing was insanely easy, they didn’t check any paperwork, and only took a cursory look inside the van. When we opened the van’s side door for them to look in, a gallon jug of water suddenly came crashing down, flying out of the van and landing at the guard’s feet!
It seems like a very bad idea to have things leaping out of vans at guards with guns, but luckily they didn’t even flinch. (A clear example of white privilege – not only can we nonchalantly cross into Mexico anytime we want, we can also abruptly toss large flying objects at guards without being shot.)
The crossing only took a moment, and we were soon on our way.
The sign says, “Bienvenidos A Sonoyta” (Welcome to Sonoyta). The name of the street we live on in Tucson is Sonoita. When we were first buying our house last year, we tried to pronounce Sonoita in the Spanish way, where the “i” would make an “ee” sound, as in “son-o-ee-ta”, with the accent on the “ee”. But we were wrong, it’s pronounced “son-oy-ta”. Well, turns out we were pronouncing it wrong because it’s spelled wrong, lol. Our street should be Sonoyta, not Sonoita. For awhile some years ago I worked as a city planner in southern California, and misspellings of Spanish street names is a pet peeve of mine! Pretend Spanish is also in that same category.
Soon we arrived in Puerto Peñasco. We arrived prior to check-in time at our hotel, so we drove to a public beach. Here we are walking down to the beach from a parking area; some guys wanted $3 to park in a roped-off section of sand. Whatever. We didn’t see any public parking and it was good enough. We were at the beach!
Here’s what it looked like walking down toward the public beach from our patch-in-the-sand parking lot.
Those beach shelters on the right were for rent for a couple of dollars. It was very hot in the sun but we had been sitting, driving all morning so we decided to walk the beach in the heat.
Yay, ocean!
After walking for a short distance we reached some big vacation condos and hotels. They all had shaded lounge chairs in the sand for their guests, and I was getting desperate for some shade. But John made the mistake of politely asking if we could sit there if we weren’t staying at the hotel. The woman looked at him like, “why would he ask such a thing?“, and politely, reluctantly, told him the lounge chairs were for guests only.
Obviously, instead of asking, we could have simply plopped down in a couple of the shaded lounge chairs like any other white tourist couple coming back from a stroll on the beach, particularly because we’re twice the age of most of the rest of the tourists! But John is a rule-follower, and he didn’t want (horrors) to risk being asked to move.
Without an option for shade, I just plopped down in the ocean to eat my lunch.
The ocean didn’t actually cool me off much because the water was crazy hot. John later looked it up on the internet, and said the water in that area is currently 88ºF, which sounds hot, but there in the shallows, I think it was even hotter than that. It felt significantly hotter than my pool water in Tucson, and I’m not sure how that’s possible.
Just when I thought I was going to burn up, it was time to head to our vacation rental. Our rental was in a suburban area outside of town called Las Conchas. It is just a strip of large fancy houses and some smaller vacation rental units along an otherwise empty beach.
Las Conchas is not popular with the young tourists because it’s about 10 minute drive out of town and there are no bars or restaurants within walking distance. But even so, we were still the oldest people there. When vacationing we’re used to seeing a preponderance of boomers a decade older than us, so it was strange to be the old ones! I guess boomers don’t like Rocky Point.
Maybe it’s because if you’re going to fly to Mexico, you might as well fly to somewhere more interesting. This area caters to people driving down from California and Arizona.
Our room was small and very cute. With great storage!
It had a little table by the front door. Here’s John memorizing the passcode used to unlock the front door. I had to keep a picture of the code on my phone; it was a string of numbers that was too long for my little brain to retain.
Functional bathroom. It was handy that the sink was in the main room.
Look at this amazing balcony!
It’s like we’re in Greece!
Except without the crowds!
Ours is an end unit.
There are only 7 units; a big one in the middle and three on each side.
Happy me!
We had both cell reception and wifi, so our phones worked fine. It was funny though, all the ads were in Spanish!
Here are the palapas for our hotel. There’s no one anywhere; we have the whole place to ourselves.
Time to head home! The driving part is never as much fun as the visiting part. We left at dawn to try to make it through Los Angeles before the afternoon traffic got impossible. But it was already impossible by the time we got close, so we swung east early and skirted north of LA, then dropped down to San Bernardino and out to Palm Desert for the night.
My initial vote was to stay in Ventura for the night and hit LA first thing on Sunday morning. I was imagining one more evening walk on the beach. And LA is a breeze early on Sunday mornings. But then we would have had a really long drive on Sunday, and we were getting anxious to get home. So all the way to Palm Desert it is.
I know there’s some beautiful resorts in the Palm Springs – Palm Desert area (I’ve seen pictures; I’ve not actually stayed at them). But we just picked a regular hotel on the freeway. It was a newer area, but had a vague feeling of apocalypse because the desert sand was drifting over all the new sidewalks and shop patios. I got the feeling that if everyone turned their back for a week, the whole place would disappear under a sand dune.
Plus really bizarre weather.
Look! A UFO! The next morning there was a UFO out the window.
Oh, wait, I guess that glowing white saucer is sitting on top of a building painted the same slate blue as the hills and the sky behind it.
I wouldn’t have been surprised though. Seriously, the place was odd.
We expected the rest of our drive to be uneventful. Southern California to Tucson is generally a fairly easy drive because there’s not much traffic. The traffic can pick up a bit in Phoenix, but there’s a loop route around, and it’s never been an issue for us.
I was confidently barreling along in Phoenix when all of a sudden the skies opened and visibility went to zero. Rain was sheeting across the freeway and accidents were happening right in front of us. Right-hand lanes were being closed by emergency vehicles, as water under the underpasses started ponding too deep to drive through.
We got off the freeway initially, but then got back on, thanking heaven for our extra-large tires and high clearance. I almost got off a second time, to sit out the storm in a parking lot, but instead we exited to a different freeway to head around downtown on the loop road. The new freeway headed up and out of the low area, and it looked a lot clearer – high and almost dry.
But just when I thought I was clear of the potentially deep water, and was accelerating uphill on a curving overpass, I hit deep water and started to hydroplane. How is is it possible to have so much water on an incline?
There was literally a river flowing down the overpass, in the steeply banked left-hand lanes with the freeway curving right. The leftmost lanes near the top of the crest had the highest elevation of anywhere nearby and were the absolute last place I would have expected to find deep water. But suddenly we were inundated with water everywhere. I couldn’t see anything. The anti-lock brakes triggered and I could feel the back of the van slip. It felt like the van was going to continue straight as the road curved right. I imagined us sliding sideways over the side of the overpass guardrail. It was terrifying.
An instant later the tires made contact with the road again and we were fine, but I felt so stupid afterwards. I spent the first half of my life in the Pacific Northwest, and I’m used to heavy rains and a lot of water on the freeways. I thought I knew all about how to avoid hydroplaning. I just didn’t expect the water to be so deep, so far up on a hill like that. I expected it to be pooling in the low areas. But the rain was coming down so fast that it turned even the inclines into rivers.
We made it home safely, but that was not the last of our issues with too much water in the desert.
Meanwhile, despite monsoon storms and trees falling back home, I was having a great time with my friend Tracey in Livermore. She carved out most of her week for me, which was so special!
The first day we went on a long walk at Sycamore Grove, which is a very pleasant park near her neighborhood. It’s a good long walk, about 5 miles around the loop. I did a lot better than on my visit last summer, which was only a month or two after I finished my chemotherapy. I think we didn’t even do the whole loop last summer. And Tracey said I was walking faster this year too. Next year I’ll be jogging it. Twice!
After our walk we had lunch at Garré Vineyard, which has a large outdoor patio with beautiful views of the surrounding vineyards. Unfortunately I forgot to take any pictures! But we had excellent salads and enjoyed the views, and were grateful it wasn’t smoky like it was when I visited last year.
Then we hung out in her backyard, which is very comfortable and the weather was perfect. I failed to take any pictures of the first day, except for this drink because it was yummy and I wanted to remember what it was.
I really like fizzy waters that aren’t sweetened. This one has a little bit of fruit juice in it, but many are magically flavored with nothing in them at all. How is that even possible? My sister introduced me to the La Croix brand a couple of years ago, which is still my staple, but there are a lot of other good brands too.
I also took a picture of her hand soap to remember what it was, because it smelled exactly like meyer lemons. Often lemon-scented things smell like cleaning products to me, but this one smelled wonderful.
The next day we drove up to Lafayette Lake near Walnut Creek to go for a walk around the lake.
There are also hiking trails up into the hills, but it was a fairly warm day and we decided just to do the lake loop.
Finally I remembered to take a picture of us!
We noticed they had row boats and paddle boats – and idea occurred to us – let’s come back tomorrow with the kayak!
After our walk Tracey (who is an excellent tour guide) had lined us up at yet another great little outdoor patio café in yet another nearby cute little downtown.
The next day we came back with my inflatable kayak.
They had to inspect it for zebra mussels, which took all of 3 seconds, and charged me $10 to launch it, but it was easy. We carried it down to the dock and off we went!
Tracey is not an experienced kayaker and I’m a bad tour guide and we almost ended up with her falling between the dock and the kayak while getting in! I felt so bad, like, oh my gosh, I’m going to dump my friend in the lake! I was trying not to panic – what do I do? But she’s a trooper and managed to stay out of the water, and hopped expertly into the kayak on her second try. Disaster averted! She’s a good sport.
It was such a pleasant paddle.
Selfies!
We saw deer along the shore and got quite close, but I didn’t take any pictures of them. Here’s a blue heron on the shoreline.
And there it goes!
I could get used to this, walking or paddling around in the morning, having a salmon salad outside at a nice café for lunch, hanging out in the backyard all afternoon. That is totally my style of life. All this striving and trying and flying and driving – nah. I just want to take walks, go to cafés, and sit in the backyard and talk.
On our last day we met Tracey and Bob for one final patio meal. Looking good!
As a going away gift, Tracey gave me a can of the sparkling water I had enjoyed, as well as the meyer lemon hand soap I had coveted, plus the same two items in grapefruit flavor for John (grapefruit is John’s favorite), all wrapped up in a festive gift bag. It was perfect; modest yet thoughtful, and funny too. John and I are both really bad at gift giving, so we were in awe. The restaurant thought it was my birthday, but thank goodness they didn’t sing!
Since we were in California, we decided to tack on a work week for John before heading home. He can only get about half his work done from home, the other half needs to be done onsite. He can do his onsite work in either Albuquerque or Livermore, which is the far east edge of the Bay Area. We decided it made sense for him to work a week in Livermore, because then we could go back to Tucson rather than all the way to Albuquerque. After two weeks of vacation, he needed to get caught up with his onsite work.
On our second morning in Livermore, I got text messages with alarming photos from my gardener and from my neighbor. Uh-oh. There had been a big storm in Tucson.
Our gardener started working on clean-up right away. He assured me the branches had not hit our pickup truck or our roof.
The backyard was even worse.
In the backyard we had a big section of tree down on our fence.
The fence was still standing (there is a good strong fence on the other side of that bamboo screening). So no major harm done, just clean-up to do.
We’re realizing we’re going to need to take out that huge tree in the front. It’s brittle, one of the two major trunks is splitting down the middle, and the other major trunk leans dangerously over the house.
It’s a huge tree; it’ll be a couple thousand dollars to remove. I have no idea when we’re going to be able to get someone out to do it – everyone is going to be booked for months because now there’s trees down all through Tucson. We’re getting record monsoon rains. I hope it hangs on until we can get it taken down. It’s a beautiful tree and we got it trimmed up last year in hopes of saving it, but we can’t have that enormous tree coming down on the house.
I was having a fun time in Livermore with a good friend of mine (I’ll write about those adventures in my next post), and John was getting a lot of needed work done. But we were also starting to feel like maybe it was time to get home!
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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