A Day in the West
Sep. 12th, 2015 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aMet up with the Appels yesterday: my dad, Mary, Melody, Jarod, and new member, pup Koloa. (Kimberly was unfortunately unable to join us due to current struggles with meds.)
They picked me up at about 9.45. The plan was for 9.30, but they'd typed the wrong address into the Waze app and so Stephen Colbert (the current voice of Waze) correctly directed them to an incorrect address 12 blocks away, and then they had to drive across Berkeley, fighting with busy streets, to get back. I mention this mainly because overreliance on modern mapping apps was a theme for the day.
(That's foreshadowing.)
Our first stop was Land's End. That's the northwest corner of San Francisco. Kimberly and I have hiked there before, though that's five years gone I suspect. It's a great trail, very well-defined and pretty heavily used, but with beautiful views of the Golden Gate.
Unfortunately, it took us almost two hours to get from our house to Land's End. The Bay Bridge was awful (though my dad got to ride on the new bridge for the first time), and then the drive across San Francisco involved buses constantly pulling out at us and vehicles constantly illegally double-parked and causing us grief. We only got to Land's End around 11.30 or so, and even then there was a delay while my dad and I got some quick-energy from cookies and Mary had a whole salad for lunch (because she'd eaten breakfast at 6am).
The trail was nice, as ever. My dad was less-than-thrilled with the 10 or so flights of stairs, right in the middle, when you rise and then descend before heading on to Eagle's Point. But, there was nice scenery, nice company, and a dog having fun. It was great. There were also pictures taken along the way here and there.
At Eagle's Point we turned around and came back, with one change on the way back. When we got the Labyrinth, Mary, Melody, and I hiked down to see it (while Jared and my dad and the dog rested at the top). The Labyrinth is just a little spiral of stones that sits out on one of the promontories along the trail. It was recently destroyed by )*(#@_(#$ vandals, but we were happy to see it built up again. Melody and I each walked the Labyrinth and added a stone to it. Then it was back up to the main trail, which is a bajillion stairs (about 20 flights all told going to the Labyrinth and back). When I walked up those steps some years ago when Kimberly and I walked it, I was exhausted, but this time, I felt great. So, I'm clearly in better shape than I was several years ago. Yay, biking and Fitbit. (I turned out to have sore legs today though, presumably from the ~50 flights of stairs that I walked all together while out on the hike.)
And that was pretty much Land's End, the hiking and active part of our day.
Melody found us a nearby deli to have lunch at (a successful use of mapping technology). There was a bit of a wrangle about finding somewhere with outside seating so that Koloa could join us (another continuing theme for the day), but I came up with a solution to that: we got our sandwiches, and then drove a couple of blocks over to Golden Gate Park. After driving a few blocks through the Park, we found a picnic table, with parking nearby-ish. Voila!
(My dad was impressed with how well I knew the area, and I told him that though I don't get to SF much, when I do I'm walking or biking, and so I get to know the territory much better.)
The sandwiches were good. Three of us had Dutch Crunch, and it was good. There were chips too.
I was tempted to title this entry, "If you value your life, travel not to Point Reyes." Because that was our next destination. My dad had wanted to see it because he never had, in his decades in the Bay Area, and Jared and I had both glanced at Google Maps and seen that it was just an hour from Land's End.
So it seemed reasonable.
What we hadn't really realized is that Point Reyes is vast and empty. Though part of it is just an hour from San Francisco, you can keep driving and driving and driving and find nothing but roads for hours.
Our road to Point Reyes started when highway 1 diverges from 101. I saw a really cool bike trail there that seemed to be running on a wooden pier through a marsh or something. Looking at the maps now, I think it might have been a trail around Coyote Creek near Sausalito, but I'm not sure. 1 runs to the coast, and then up the coast. Unfortunately, early on it's way up in the hills, so you don't get great views until you drop down to Bolinas Lagoon (but that was beautiful). And it's full of twists and turns. Fortunately, there's was Bonine all around at lunch, thanks to my dad's supply and the supply I pilfered from Kimberly before I left.
Eventually we diverged from 1 and started heading deeper into Point Reyes, toward the Point. We were past an hour into the trip by this point, as we were well into the Park, and also often going slower than the speed limit on windy roads. (Stephen Colbert kept telling us there were traffic jams ahead, and as best I can figure, it's just because many cars in that area go below the speed limit, because they don't want to die.)
Coming up on two hours, we were deep into the Park and getting close the point, and zeroing in on some signs that promised beaches and a lighthouse. We finally chose Drake's Beach mainly because it promised bathrooms. On the way, the Waze app largely failed, telling us that we were driving through fields well before we got to the Beach.
Drake's Beach was cold and gray and very windy. The visitor's center there was closed, even though it should have been either open or just closing (because it was drawing up on 5pm). The bathrooms were open, though, and huge. There was a changing area that you could have fit a couple of king-sized beds in. Given the conditions of the beach, it was presumably for changing into parkas.
A lady walking her service dog on the beach told Jared and Melody not to walk their non-service-dog, lest they get ticketed. She suggested South Beach instead, which I picked out on a nice map on one of the walls of the area.
On the way away from Drake's Beach we saw the bizarrest thing: a huge elk head poking up over a hillside. There was presumably an elk attached. It had antlers from here to eternity. It seemed so over-the-top and larger-than-life that I figured it must be a statue or something, but Melody says it moved. (Perhaps it was just being blown by the gail-force winds.)
It was another mile to South Beach, where we find another wind-swept, frozen, post-apocalyptic wasteland. This was a pets-allowed beach, so Koloa frolicked around after her 5 or 6 hours in the car to that point. Fun was had by all. Except Mary, who hid in the car to avoid the gail.
We probably spent a total of 15-20 minutes on those two beaches. Tops. Then it was back in the car to escape from Point Reyes.
There were map-nav problems on the way home too, because we'd lost cell signals about 5 miles before we got to the Beaches. We hoped we could get signals back before we had to make the decisions about which way we were going as we got back toward civilization. Fortunately, my AT&T eventually picked up (and so we used Google Maps instead of Waze for the navigation on the way home).
We were fortunately able to take a different route home, which cut straight across the peninsula before dropping us back on 101. It was much less winding, and I found it much prettier. That's because the landscape was much more what I think of as typical California. Lots of hills, mixed green and brown.
Strangely: there were big rocks deposited here and there. Some were man-sized, some much larger. I don't tend to see rocks like that dotting the landscape in our local parks, so I was curious what was up with that.
And then we hit the Richmond bridge, and there was more horrible traffic. Because, apparently, bridges suck when you're not biking them (but they also suck when you can't bike them, which is currently the case for two of the three Bridges we rode over on Friday).
By now we were trying to figure out the meal-with-a-dog question again. Someone suggested we could maybe take something home, and I called Kimberly to get her OK on that. An hour and thirty minutes or so after we left South Beach, we thus pulled up into Oscar's, where we bought burgers, chicken sandwiches, and fries to take home.
Kimberly had the cats locked up by the time we got home, so Koloa was allowed in the house.
After the meal, though, I let Callisto out, and she was pretty OK with the dog. She kept sniffing him and laying down to watch him (safely out of reach!). She never seemed particularly concerned or worried about him, even though he's 4x her size. Well, except when she got stepped on by a backing-up Koloa, and then she went and hid out in the Dining Room for a bit, to clean herself.
So that was the big day with the Appels. The company was great and Land's End was great, but there was way too much driving afterward. My dad was pretty apologetic about picking Point Reyes, but none of us were too upset about it. Jared and I had both looked it up and raised no concerns, and as I said, it wasn't some place I would have ever biked too.
We all can say we saw Point Reyes now, and probably won't again.
I was dead exhausted by the time the family left around 9pm or so. Too tired to do anything but read, and much to Kimberly's surprise, I then went to bed early (something I pretty much never do, because I can't fall asleep).
I'm still worn out today. I had to have a fruit soda to get my energy up enough to role-play, but then managed to stay alert and awake for the afternoon. (Hopefully that tiredness is from the day full of driving and socializing, but Kimberly appears to have come down with a cold, so I may now be fighting that off too.)
They picked me up at about 9.45. The plan was for 9.30, but they'd typed the wrong address into the Waze app and so Stephen Colbert (the current voice of Waze) correctly directed them to an incorrect address 12 blocks away, and then they had to drive across Berkeley, fighting with busy streets, to get back. I mention this mainly because overreliance on modern mapping apps was a theme for the day.
(That's foreshadowing.)
Our first stop was Land's End. That's the northwest corner of San Francisco. Kimberly and I have hiked there before, though that's five years gone I suspect. It's a great trail, very well-defined and pretty heavily used, but with beautiful views of the Golden Gate.
Unfortunately, it took us almost two hours to get from our house to Land's End. The Bay Bridge was awful (though my dad got to ride on the new bridge for the first time), and then the drive across San Francisco involved buses constantly pulling out at us and vehicles constantly illegally double-parked and causing us grief. We only got to Land's End around 11.30 or so, and even then there was a delay while my dad and I got some quick-energy from cookies and Mary had a whole salad for lunch (because she'd eaten breakfast at 6am).
The trail was nice, as ever. My dad was less-than-thrilled with the 10 or so flights of stairs, right in the middle, when you rise and then descend before heading on to Eagle's Point. But, there was nice scenery, nice company, and a dog having fun. It was great. There were also pictures taken along the way here and there.
At Eagle's Point we turned around and came back, with one change on the way back. When we got the Labyrinth, Mary, Melody, and I hiked down to see it (while Jared and my dad and the dog rested at the top). The Labyrinth is just a little spiral of stones that sits out on one of the promontories along the trail. It was recently destroyed by )*(#@_(#$ vandals, but we were happy to see it built up again. Melody and I each walked the Labyrinth and added a stone to it. Then it was back up to the main trail, which is a bajillion stairs (about 20 flights all told going to the Labyrinth and back). When I walked up those steps some years ago when Kimberly and I walked it, I was exhausted, but this time, I felt great. So, I'm clearly in better shape than I was several years ago. Yay, biking and Fitbit. (I turned out to have sore legs today though, presumably from the ~50 flights of stairs that I walked all together while out on the hike.)
And that was pretty much Land's End, the hiking and active part of our day.
Melody found us a nearby deli to have lunch at (a successful use of mapping technology). There was a bit of a wrangle about finding somewhere with outside seating so that Koloa could join us (another continuing theme for the day), but I came up with a solution to that: we got our sandwiches, and then drove a couple of blocks over to Golden Gate Park. After driving a few blocks through the Park, we found a picnic table, with parking nearby-ish. Voila!
(My dad was impressed with how well I knew the area, and I told him that though I don't get to SF much, when I do I'm walking or biking, and so I get to know the territory much better.)
The sandwiches were good. Three of us had Dutch Crunch, and it was good. There were chips too.
I was tempted to title this entry, "If you value your life, travel not to Point Reyes." Because that was our next destination. My dad had wanted to see it because he never had, in his decades in the Bay Area, and Jared and I had both glanced at Google Maps and seen that it was just an hour from Land's End.
So it seemed reasonable.
What we hadn't really realized is that Point Reyes is vast and empty. Though part of it is just an hour from San Francisco, you can keep driving and driving and driving and find nothing but roads for hours.
Our road to Point Reyes started when highway 1 diverges from 101. I saw a really cool bike trail there that seemed to be running on a wooden pier through a marsh or something. Looking at the maps now, I think it might have been a trail around Coyote Creek near Sausalito, but I'm not sure. 1 runs to the coast, and then up the coast. Unfortunately, early on it's way up in the hills, so you don't get great views until you drop down to Bolinas Lagoon (but that was beautiful). And it's full of twists and turns. Fortunately, there's was Bonine all around at lunch, thanks to my dad's supply and the supply I pilfered from Kimberly before I left.
Eventually we diverged from 1 and started heading deeper into Point Reyes, toward the Point. We were past an hour into the trip by this point, as we were well into the Park, and also often going slower than the speed limit on windy roads. (Stephen Colbert kept telling us there were traffic jams ahead, and as best I can figure, it's just because many cars in that area go below the speed limit, because they don't want to die.)
Coming up on two hours, we were deep into the Park and getting close the point, and zeroing in on some signs that promised beaches and a lighthouse. We finally chose Drake's Beach mainly because it promised bathrooms. On the way, the Waze app largely failed, telling us that we were driving through fields well before we got to the Beach.
Drake's Beach was cold and gray and very windy. The visitor's center there was closed, even though it should have been either open or just closing (because it was drawing up on 5pm). The bathrooms were open, though, and huge. There was a changing area that you could have fit a couple of king-sized beds in. Given the conditions of the beach, it was presumably for changing into parkas.
A lady walking her service dog on the beach told Jared and Melody not to walk their non-service-dog, lest they get ticketed. She suggested South Beach instead, which I picked out on a nice map on one of the walls of the area.
On the way away from Drake's Beach we saw the bizarrest thing: a huge elk head poking up over a hillside. There was presumably an elk attached. It had antlers from here to eternity. It seemed so over-the-top and larger-than-life that I figured it must be a statue or something, but Melody says it moved. (Perhaps it was just being blown by the gail-force winds.)
It was another mile to South Beach, where we find another wind-swept, frozen, post-apocalyptic wasteland. This was a pets-allowed beach, so Koloa frolicked around after her 5 or 6 hours in the car to that point. Fun was had by all. Except Mary, who hid in the car to avoid the gail.
We probably spent a total of 15-20 minutes on those two beaches. Tops. Then it was back in the car to escape from Point Reyes.
There were map-nav problems on the way home too, because we'd lost cell signals about 5 miles before we got to the Beaches. We hoped we could get signals back before we had to make the decisions about which way we were going as we got back toward civilization. Fortunately, my AT&T eventually picked up (and so we used Google Maps instead of Waze for the navigation on the way home).
We were fortunately able to take a different route home, which cut straight across the peninsula before dropping us back on 101. It was much less winding, and I found it much prettier. That's because the landscape was much more what I think of as typical California. Lots of hills, mixed green and brown.
Strangely: there were big rocks deposited here and there. Some were man-sized, some much larger. I don't tend to see rocks like that dotting the landscape in our local parks, so I was curious what was up with that.
And then we hit the Richmond bridge, and there was more horrible traffic. Because, apparently, bridges suck when you're not biking them (but they also suck when you can't bike them, which is currently the case for two of the three Bridges we rode over on Friday).
By now we were trying to figure out the meal-with-a-dog question again. Someone suggested we could maybe take something home, and I called Kimberly to get her OK on that. An hour and thirty minutes or so after we left South Beach, we thus pulled up into Oscar's, where we bought burgers, chicken sandwiches, and fries to take home.
Kimberly had the cats locked up by the time we got home, so Koloa was allowed in the house.
After the meal, though, I let Callisto out, and she was pretty OK with the dog. She kept sniffing him and laying down to watch him (safely out of reach!). She never seemed particularly concerned or worried about him, even though he's 4x her size. Well, except when she got stepped on by a backing-up Koloa, and then she went and hid out in the Dining Room for a bit, to clean herself.
So that was the big day with the Appels. The company was great and Land's End was great, but there was way too much driving afterward. My dad was pretty apologetic about picking Point Reyes, but none of us were too upset about it. Jared and I had both looked it up and raised no concerns, and as I said, it wasn't some place I would have ever biked too.
We all can say we saw Point Reyes now, and probably won't again.
I was dead exhausted by the time the family left around 9pm or so. Too tired to do anything but read, and much to Kimberly's surprise, I then went to bed early (something I pretty much never do, because I can't fall asleep).
I'm still worn out today. I had to have a fruit soda to get my energy up enough to role-play, but then managed to stay alert and awake for the afternoon. (Hopefully that tiredness is from the day full of driving and socializing, but Kimberly appears to have come down with a cold, so I may now be fighting that off too.)