Traveling Johns

This was Gay Pride Parade day in San Francisco. I usually find the parade fairly dull, even depressing, partly I suppose because it usually overcast at the end of June and it gets pretty cold standing there on Market Street as people representing every conceivable club and interest saunter past. But today was warm and sunny, and we had to get the car closer to the Bay Bridge in order to make it to Oakland in the afternoon, so I did not protest going to the parade.

Edie was a big hit with many of the spectators and marchers. As the day when on she accumulated more and more beads and other neck adornments until she looked quite festive indeed. She liked the attention, though she hated the sound of the motorcycles, and, to my great pride, seemed to really dislike the sound of disco. A couple people asked to get their pictures taken with her. We had to leave the parade early, and walked back through the staging area where everybody was waiting. This was probably the best part of all, not unlike walking down Orange Grove before the Rose Parade starts. No floats to admire, but people came up and wanted to pet Edie. She had her picture taken with some guy in a beagle outfit from the SPCA.

We actually had NO PROBLEM at all getting to Oakland, a huge difference from last night. We stopped by Trader Joe’s in Emeryville to pick up some beer as Naida requested. I can’t believe all the building that has taken place in this formerly industrial East Bay city. It’s not particularly attractive, frankly – it looks a bit like the same kind of apartments and shopping malls that they also build cheaply in places on Oxnard or Covina – but it sure is different from the warehouses and factories that used to be there.

There were more people than usual at the party this year. I guess many were friends of friends. John’s friend Dan came from Sacramento along with his friend Helen. The garden looked good, but not as stunning as it had in prior years. Edie and Canela got along a little better after some initial growls: Edie is pretty good about using playfulness to diffuse tension. She was a big hit with the party goers, particularly as she was still decked out in all her pride parade paraphernalia.

We left about six or so to drive up towards Sonoma County and Mike’s place.

I woke up the next morning at the Laurel Inn. This small hotel is located on the corner of Presidio and California. We stayed here last year. It works well for us: the hotel has parking, is reasonably priced, and it takes dogs. Our room this year was on the second floor, so the view was not quite as good as we had last year from the fourth floor. Still, otherwise the room was identical.

I decided that Edie and I should have a good long walk while John slept. Part of this was also the desire, I have to admit, to work off a few of the calories that I had absorbed the previous day at two big restaurant meals. We set off towards the Presidio, following the same path that Spanish soldiers used in the eighteenth century to walk between the fort and the mission. In no time at all we were at the main part of the old army base. I was not sure where to go now, and the Bridge on this clear day seemed so tantalizingly close. So I figured, why not walk to Marin?

It proved to be a longer hike than I planned on. By the time we finished, walking across the Bridge and back, and returning home through Crissy Field and the Lyons Street stairs, we had walked for a little over three hours without stopping. We must have done at least ten miles. Surprisingly, although I was hot and my feet hurt a bit from my sandals — not a great choice for a walk this long — I really was not tired.

I washed up and ate some breakfast from the pastries and juices provided in the lobby, and John and I discussed our options for the day. We knew we were going to have dinner that evening in Oakland with Naida and the rest of the group, but otherwise the day was open. John wanted to go to see Jersey Boys. It did not particularly interest me, but I figured that there would probably be no tickets available for the matinee and so I did not protest when he said he wanted to stop by the box office to check.

It turned out that the box office was not open yet, but he did managed to get full-price tickets from the booth on Union Square. We walked around downtown for a bit looking at this and that. We stopped by the California Historical Society bookstore, and I checked to see if they had any primary source materials suitable for fourth grade students. I was surprised that they did not. Maybe this is a book for me to write and publish…. We tried to look around the now-completed Yerba Buena project, but this proved to be surprisingly hostile territory for dogs. It’s not that interesting anyhow, and rather disappointing since it took nearly 30 years to bring this project to completion.

Jersey Boys was better than I expected. It is tightly written and produced, and the it keeps moving quickly through its VH 1 story. I never listened to the Four Seasons as a child, and I am not an Italian from New Jersey, so it did not have much emotional resonance for me. The whole thing is quite reminiscent of Dream Girls, but that musical broke new group twenty some years ago in staging and other areas. This was sort of like Dream Girls with red sauce. We were surprised to find Mayra Gassman sitting in the row behind us. We drove her to her hotel, a bleak looking place in the Chinese section of North Beach which made us glad to be staying at the Laurel Inn.

It took us forever to get to Oakland. I think were were stuck for just about twenty minutes on one block near First Street. Once we got on the Bridge the traffic was not so bad, and the GPS did a good job of getting us to the restaurant. Neither Bob nor Raul came, but I finally had a chance to meet Ginger, one of those people whose name I had heard for years and years. The food at the Tropix restaurant was pretty good. I had some goat stew. The corn bread was really the best part!

Today was a day for keeping connected with family and friends. And, as such, it was a very good day.

I got up fairly early in the morning, and after doing some revisions to yesterday’s Blog entry and posting a few photographs, I took Edie up to the dog park where we had had so much fun yesterday afternoon. There were not many dogs there this morning, and nobody really wanted to play with Edie. We just walked around a bit, and then returned to the motel.

John had picked up some breakfast items from the buffet in the office, and Edie seemed to think that the blueberry bagels were more edible than we found them. There was not much reason to stick around San Luis, so we packed up the car and drove on to Carmel.

It’s a pretty dull drive through the backcountry of Monterey County, but you have to be careful because the CHP is around every hill and bend in the highway ready to issue speeding tickets. It seems like there’s more of King City than there used to be, but that’s not really a good thing. Santa Maria, Santa Rosa, and King City are all places whose sole redeeming quality was their smallness, but not even that is gone….

The GPS was quite useful here as it moved us through the somewhat intricate connection between Highway 101 and Highway 1. We have taken some wrong turns doing this by ourselves in the past. I programmed it to take us to Carmel City Beach, and we were there remarkably quickly.

Carmel Beach is probably my favorite place in the world to take the dog. It’s stunningly beautiful, no matter whether it is sunny or foggy, and it is perfectly legal to have a dog off-leash here. And this beach is always filled with the nicest and most well-bred dogs — of course, you’d expect no less in Carmel! Edie had a nice romp or two as we walked down the beach.

We met Dianne and Jim and their house. They too are having a lot of remodeling done in their garden right now, and it was pretty torn up. Dianne greeted us warmly, but her dogs checked out Edie a little too aggressively for her taste, and she gave me a pleading look like “Take me away from here! Please!” In a few minutes, though, all were friends, and she seemed to take a particular liking to Tucker.

We had a pleasant lunch at the Casanova Restaurant. We had suggested eating at the porch here because we had stumbled across it last year and found the atmosphere and the food quite good. Again, we had a fine meal here, and we managed to keep all the conversation off the bad topics like the war in Iraq.

We pulled out of Carmel around two o’clock and headed towards San Jose. We were making such good time that John decided that he should stop somewhere to nap and walk the dog. We tried to find a suitable place, looking first at a really bleak dog park in Scotts Valley, but never found it. We did get off the beaten path and drove along a really narrow road which paralleled Highway 19. It was pretty, and also pretty slow.

We arrived at Donna’s house around four. At first we thought that maybe nobody was home, but she answered to door with a big smile on her face. Her dog, Missy, was in the back yard and she was hesitant about introducing her to Edie because she had not done well with their last canine visitor. But John urged her to give it a try, and the two dogs were soon frolicking in the back.

She talked about her work as a middle-school librarian and the blessings and worries of being the mother of two adolescent girls. Megan is currently at Cal Poly, studying chemistry, and Katie will be starting her senior year of high school. She showed us some pictures of the two girls. Katie joined us. I remember her best as a young girl, and it was hard to suppress all those stupid “You’ve grown so big” comments that adults are prone to make at moments like this.

When George came home we chatted for a big then went off to a Japanese restaurant in a mall nearby. We had a decent dinner, and it was fun to catch up on how everybody was doing. We could have talked for longer — not dangerous topics to avoid with the Lydons — but we still had a while to go before settling in for the night in San Francisco so we said our goodbyes and hit the road.

Well, somehow I managed to get packed up, clean up my room, and finish all my paperwork today. We’re in San Luis tonight at a Best Western Motel. Edie’s resting peacefully at the foot of the bed, and I guess John is in the jacuzzi.

Our finally faculty meeting of the year was a strange mixture of hostility and triumph. Michael Lee’s departure had been announced about a week ago, and Melissa’s departure was announced on Tuesday. Today we had a perfect sweep as Suzie announced that Kurt was moving on to an assistant principal job in Encino. Suzie harangued us with comments about how “I am the only principal here” and “The buck stops here”, but nobody was particularly listening. Instead many of us were exchanging smiles and whispers of “Three out of three” while Michael sat there impassively and Melissa almost seemed to be frothing at the mouth.

Anyhow, we had our usual end of the year luncheon, and the food seemed particularly good this year. John stopped by to pick me up, and he was eager to show off our new rings. Suzie again tried to recruit him to teach the open kindergarten class, but he said something like “Let me think about it. No.” Now that Vershawn has also departed from our lives, John does not seem to eager to return to the classroom.

We left Third Street and headed to Universal City where the Arts Education Branch had scheduled its end-of-the-year luncheon. It was the usual kind of hotel and banquet food, so we were happy that we’d eaten at Third Street. It was nice to see Jill and Christina and Don and a few other people I knew, but the warm feelings evaporated once Rich Burrows began to pontificate about how he had said this or that to some person and how they had said he was so right and so clever. . . . After about twenty minutes of that we slipped out.

Traffic was pretty good as we went through the Valley and into Ventura County. Our rain was so sparse this year that the hills never seemed to really ever turn green, and now they look so parched and dry. It was a hot, hazy day, too, and the dreariness of the endless suburban sprawl and the drought-stricken landscape seemed deeply depressing. I was tired and I drifted off to sleep. We stopped briefly off the highway because it seemed like Edie needed to relieve herself. She did, but managed to get herself covered with those little burrs of grass. We pulled a bunch off of her, but she still covered a good bit of the back area with them. John asked me to put on a book from his iPod. I am not sure what the title is; the author is named Jane Smiley; and it is some kind of murder mystery about some friends in New York. It put me back to sleep, and when I woke up we were already in Santa Barbara.

We took the San Marcos Pass, and we reminisced about taking that road with his old Mazda, a wreck of a car which wheezed and panted as it climbed that hill. The chaparral was thicker now, though it still looked dry, and there was more water in Lake Cachuma than I thought there might be. We stopped briefly in Los Olivos so John could get a cup of coffee. I remembered being there for my 30th birthday. I felt so old then, though when I look at pictures from that party I look like I was barely out of high school!

We continued on through the new and ugly sprawl of Santa Maria and Nipomo – even I remember when these were barely more than villages – into San Luis. John had made reservations for us at a Best Western not far from the Madonna Inn. It would hardly have been our first choice of places to stay in other circumstances, but when you are traveling with a dog your choices are somewhat limited. It is the usual ugly cement building with the usual ugly cement pool in the central courtyard, but for tonight I guess it will be home.

The dog book had recommended this place in part because there is an off-leash dog park just a short walk away. John and I went looking for this, with Edie in tow, of course, and we found it without any particular problem. It was a nice place. Unlike Laurel Canyon Park, there was still some grass left and the dogs were particularly friendly. It seemed like many of the people there came there knew each other, and there dogs also were long-time friends. Edie was a little reticent at first, but she was soon frolicking around with several dogs, particularly a German Shepherd named Zeus. There was a small lake at the edge of the park and we walked over there to take a look. Edie refused to get on the gangway that led down to a floating platform, no matter how much we pleaded or pulled.

We went back to the car and went to downtown San Luis for the farmers’ market. John had read about the Thursday night farmers’ market here, one of the only evening farmers’ markets in the country. He also knew that dogs were strictly prohibited from this event, so Edie had to stay in the car. We had fun. It was a farmers’ market, but it was also a street fair with performers and crafts sellers and booths for everything from the the Libertarian Party – two old guys with a sign demanding “Stop Compulsory Compassion!” to the United Church of Christ. There were enormous lines for barbecue, so I had a really good Oaxaca-style tamale. We watched some kids doing tumbling, and heard some guy with an electric piano croon out bar ballads.

Edie was glad to see us when we returned to the car. She was even happier when she had her dinner. Now it’s late, but I cannot keep my eyes open a moment longer. So more later.

We’re going to leave tomorrow, and I’m nowhere near ready. In fact, I ought to be packing right now instead of setting up a new blog. Edie has no clue that an adventure awaits her. She’s just lying on the rug near my feet. I like to think that she’s just happy being with me, but somehow I suspect she’s just waiting for me to go to bed so she can climb up on the couch where she likes to sleep even though she knows that she is not allowed to be there. So loving. So sneaky.

I somehow think I’ve managed to do just about everything I need to do to leave school tomorrow. The report cards are finished, the parents thanked, and hugs and goodbyes and thank yous have been freely exchanged. I always feel like the end of the year is rushed, and this year seemed particularly so with the play. Still, I felt good when we read our science fiction stories today. Most of them were really quite good; some, like Daniel’s and Angelo’s, were pretty funny, too.

I guess the plan is to get me from school around noon tomorrow and head on up the coast to about San Luis. We’ll be in San Francisco Friday night.