Chapter 19: South Bay and San Francisco
April 24, 1998 to May 12, 1998
4/24 We're at Maple Leaf RV Park at Morgan Hill, convenient to San Jose, Monterey, and the South San Francisco Bay area in general. The park is in a pleasant setting. We can see hills a few miles away in all directions - grass covered, with the grass beginning to fade from spring green to the subtle gold straw color it will have for most of the year. Any sheltered spot is filled with very dark green live oaks. The land immediately surrounding us is being farmed - the closest field is many acres of young squash plants, watered by a massive sprinkler system. This park has a motel-style telephone system, with phone lines available at every RV site. It's a real luxury to have a local phone directly in the trailer, and we've spent a lot of time surfing the Internet.
4/26 We picked up Barb, an old friend from back east, and spent the afternoon talking and wandering around San Jose. Two municipal gardens - one Japanese and one Chinese - provided pleasant, scenic, walks. The Tech Museum of Innovation shows promise, but isn't yet even close to the benchmark set by Toronto's Ontario Science Center. Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the visit was the huge "audio kinetic sculpture made with billiard balls that run through a giant maze" which sits outside, beside the front entrance. It's a wonderfully Rube-Goldberg style gadget, where the balls are thrown, roll, fall, swing, bounce or otherwise proceed across open space or through hundreds of feet of wire-frame passageways, causing hammers to hit chimes, and generally making interesting visual, and aural patterns. The exhibits were a mixture of static display, animated display, and hands-on science projects. The quality of the exhibits and of the written explanations and instructions, is uneven - they are still learning. Also, the museum is in the midst of a major expansion project, and seemed somewhat disorganized.
4/27 Camping World is just a few miles down SR 101 from our trailer. A quick stop to pick up a couple of items turned into a long stay. We wandered around looking at everything, and finally walked out with two shopping bags of "stuff" that we didn't know we needed.
4/28 The last time we were in Monterey, in 1973, it was still a sleepy place where portions of Cannery Row still bore some resemblance to the place described in Steinbeck's novels. Now it's a glitzy tourist attraction. Nearly all of the old waterfront buildings have been torn down. A few buildings have been remodeled or restored, several large new structures have been built, and there are dozens of little tourist boutiques and restaurants.
The Aquarium is an impressive architectural feat - on the inside it's a new, modern, building, well suited to its use. On the outside, it blends well into the few remaining old buildings, at first appearing to be a freshly painted old cannery. The exhibits are very well done. The whole place is focussed on the sea environment of Monterey Bay (with the exception of a large exhibit about the ecology of the worldwide fishing industry). The building opens out onto platforms overlooking the water, at several different levels, and some of the interpretive exhibits are outside, with a fine view of the bay. The claim to uniqueness lies in their kelp tank, where they have succeeded in establishing a full-sized, healthy, group of giant kelp plants, containing a complete ecosystem similar to that just offshore in Monterey Bay. It is viewed from three different levels in the aquarium, and is very impressive. It even has a wave-making machine which accurately simulates the continuous surge of open-water waves. The "petting zoo" is also extensive and well done. If you've ever wanted to pet a sea cucumber or a decorator crab, here's your chance! We also enjoyed viewing very clever exhibits of the extensive tunnels dug by several species of clam, shrimp, worm, etc, deep in the sand in the tidal zones. Another exhibit was a simulation of along-shore sloughs and dunes, complete with the typical birds and plants. It was interesting to be able to walk up close to normally-shy birds (killdeer, curlew ...) who went about their business seemingly unaware of the human spectators. A pair of rare California Sea Otters were just as cute, intelligent, and energetic as the fresh-water otters that we've seen elsewhere, although much larger. A recently rescued 6-week-old Sea Otter was on display and attracting huge crowds. Interestingly, a "wild" sea otter was cavorting in the bay just offshore from the museum - probably one that was rescued, rehabilitated, and released.
At dusk, we sat in a restaurant over the water and watched a seal sleeping on the rocks just outside our window, then drove back inland as the fog rolled in behind us.
4/25 In early evening, Dave drove up to Linda and Brian's house in Santa Clara, and rode with Brian up to the Palo Alto Table Tennis Club for an evening of practice. This is one of the bigger clubs in the country, with an active junior training program run by a nationally known coach, and quite a few highly ranked players.
4/29 Route 9 to Santa Cruz provided a scenic, leisurely drive through the coastal mountains. We got stopped for nearly an hour, when a motorcycle drifted out across the centerline on a tight mountain switchback, and hit an oncoming car head-on. This apparently happened just minutes before we arrived. The rider flew 50 feet up the road. The motorcycle caught fire and burned fiercely in the road until there was little left. Amazingly, the rider was alive, and was lifted into an ambulance, transported a few miles down the road to an open field, then transferred to a Medivac helicopter.
On the way back from Santa Cruz, we discovered Gayle's bakery and deli, in Capitola. Really good food, at low prices - we recommend this as a stop for anyone coming through the area.
4/30 Dave spent most of a day working on our home WWW page, adding recent chapters of the trip report, cleaning up some messy formatting, adding links to other RV-related Web pages, etc. It seems to be working ok. {And a week later, was informed that the RV Web Rings were being discontinued and that I need to remove the links}.
5/1 We drove leisurely up the peninsula on an exploratory trip. We stopped by our old house in Menlo Oaks, noting that the people we sold it to still live there after 25 years, and have added on to the house. Across the street, Peninsula School, where both children started their school experience, has a fresh coat of paint, but seems otherwise unchanged. We drove into an RV Park on 101 in Redwood City, but concluded it is not a particularly desirable destination - ok for a night or two if you really want to be in this area. Then we stopped at the RV Park on Candlestick Point, adjacent to Candlestick Park (now renamed 3Com park). This is very convenient to downtown, expensive ($35), and has narrow sites just barely long enough for our trailer. It is neat and well-maintained. The big attraction is an inexpensive shuttle which will take you to and from one of several downtown destinations - parking in the central city is a major hassle, and quite expensive. It also has a great view of the stadium, if you are into that sort of thing.
We then drove west to Pacific Beach to inspect the campground there. This park is right on the ocean - same price and same site size as Candlestick, but with a wonderful view. This will be our choice, although is means a complicated bus and train ride into the city (we'll probably drive in and take our chances on parking)
5/2 Dave spent an enjoyable day at a table tennis tournament in Palo Alto, not winning anything, but pleased at not having slid backward too much in a year of very little opportunity to play. Helen went on a garden tour, visiting about six private gardens in the Palo Alto area.
It is now trendy to divide your property into gardening "rooms", each visually separated by walls and hedges, resulting in claustrophobically small spaces on the average California luxury lot of 1/4 acre. The fashion is Mediterranean style, with peachy landscape in pink flagstone paving blocks, rock, and stucco walls. Some of the outdoor dining rooms were delightful.
5/3 We spent the evening with Linda (Helen's niece), and her husband Brian Delicious grilled chicken shishkebob, fresh baked brownies, fresh strawberries, ice cream. Yum! We spent several hours catching up on family news, reminiscing about shared events from years ago, and generally relaxing and enjoying good company.
5/4 Time to move on - but not very far. I'm writing this from an oceanside site at Pacific Park RV Resort. We're reasonably convenient to downtown San Francisco, and we're 20 feet from a cliff which drops 50 feet or more straight down into the Pacific. We can see the mountains of Marin County to the north. This row of RV sites was evacuated a couple of months ago, during El Nino storms which ate away quite a bit of the cliff. The park's picnic/barbecue areas, which had been at the edge of the cliff, are now gone. A row of houses just north of the park have all lost their rear decks and have corners of their foundations hanging out into space.
We keep hearing that El Nino is over, but it rained today, and each of the past two days, and it's well past time for the rainy season to be over. We just heard on the radio that a tornado touched down in central Sunnyvale this afternoon.
We'll spend the next few days visiting friends and doing the standard tourist things.
5/5 Still raining! Some parts the area got almost 2 inches of rain, in a month where the average is 1/4 inch. We spent the afternoon at The Palace of the Legion of Honor. The building itself is impressive - huge rooms of polished stone, ideally suited to display the art objects. The collection of Rodin sculpture is huge and varied, to name just one of the many collections. The building is on a hilltop, with a panoramic view of the Golden Gate waterfront and bridge to the North and the San Francisco downtown skyline to the east. In the evening, we drove across the bridge to Sausalito and had dinner at Scoma's, a quirky little building set on pilings over the water, built in 1899. We both had cioppino - a bouillabaisse with an Italian accent - a tomato-based seafood stew that was every bit as good as we remembered from our last stop here, 25 years ago.
5/6 We were awakened this morning at 5:30 a.m. by an invasion of television trucks. There are now six big trucks, CBS on one side of us, CNN on the other side, and other networks in the several sites north of us. CNN has a huge satellite dish antenna. The others all have telescoping towers with smaller microwave relay antennas. Each truck has a large generator running, so the overall noise level is very unpleasant. Hydraulic scissors platforms have been parked along the fence at cliff edge. These can be raised 30 feet or so in the air, with cameraman and commentator, for a clear view looking down on the action. Cables run everywhere - it's hard to leave the trailer without tripping over them. At 7 AM or so, one of the carefully coifed TV personalities knocked on our door and asked to use our bathroom.
The houses were scheduled to be demolished beginning at 8 a.m. TV turned on the spotlights and went live for the local 6 AM news, and then continued to do features, updates, and live interviews with various remote anchor personalities all over the country, off and on all day.
After all that media preparation, it was almost anticlimactic when the houses began to come down. A big hydraulic power shovel, with a five-fingered gripping tool, simply pushed the tool through the roof of a house, then pulled. A big section of house pulled away, and adjacent sections fell down. After just a few repetitions of this, the house was a pile of sticks, wallboard, and roofing, with the corner of a sink or furnace sticking out here and there. It took about half an hour per house. I suspect many of you saw it on TV sometime during the day. The generators ran continuously for over 12 hours. It took another three days to load the rubble into trucks and clean up the sites.
5/9 There hasn't been much to write about for a few days. The weather has been windy, with low clouds and fog and frequent rain. Helen spent a morning with Linda, visiting the grounds of a Carmelite Monastery and also the Rosicrucian Museum in Santa Clara, filled with reproductions such things as the Rosetta Stone. We also spent a pleasant afternoon in the Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park.
We've spent some time driving around San Francisco, enjoying the views from hilltop and waterfront. Several hours were spent in the DeYoung Museum and the Museum of Asian Art. The RV Park has filled up a bit for the weekend, but still has plenty of empty spaces.
Last night, we had a wonderful dinner with old friends, at a great restaurant at Fisherman's Wharf. It's always a treat to go out to dinner with a local gourmet, who knows where the really good food is to be had - difficult information for a visitor to obtain.
5/10 We had the rare treat of attending concerts by two professional chamber choirs on two successive nights - the San Francisco Choral Artists, on Saturday night in Palo Alto, and the San Francisco Chamber Singers on Sunday night in San Francisco. Both were outstanding. The Chamber Singers concert was an Event (with a capital "E") of some note, since it was entirely music of contemporary California composers - Kirke Mechem, Morten Lauridsen, Mark Winges, David Garner - and all four composers were present at the concert. Each composer talked about his music just before it was performed. The Chamber Singers commissioned the Winges and Garner pieces. This was the world premiere performance of the Garner piece and the Western US premiere for the Mechem composition.
5/12 It's still raining. Today, San Francisco is expected to break its all-time record for season rainfall. The record for number of rainy days in the season was broken yesterday. (The records go back to 1849). Thunderstorms, hail, and even a possible tornado, are in the forecast. We got tired of the rain and packed up headed out this morning. Next stop, the wine country of Amador County for a Zinfandel tasting.