The San Francisco Bay are was a real pain to get in and out of on Amtrak. Oakland has about 3 stations, but if you want to get into San Francisco, you have to take a bus. The bus is considered an extra segment on our 18 segment trip, so we had to get to Oakland, and leave it at that. Luckily, Moez and Sara live in Oakland, and they were nice enough to agree to launch our stay in the bay area.
Moez was a friend I had met backpacking in Australia. He and his friend Shannon had bought a van, and were tooling around the east coast, when I met them. I ended up traveling with them all the way to Darwin, and we had a big old time. Meeting some fellow americans overseas was rare enough, but meeting people who you actually could stand was even rarer, and we were all glad to see each other. Since our wild days of roaming the earth with no purpose other than to see pretty things, we have all settled down a notch. Moez has a wife, Sara, and a kid, Dureau, and Shannon, who lives down the street (globally speaking) has Dane, her main man, and keeps a real job. They all do, they all keep some real jobs, and have things going on, and have merged nicely into adult living.
SO this Moez character, he comes to get us from the train station in his two door Toyota Tercel, and somehow manage to get all of us, all our gear and our instruments into this tiny compact car. This was a record of the smallest vehicle we could all get into.
When you live in a large house, with a basement to spare, or a guest bedroom, taking on a family of four is a generous thing to do. But when you live in an efficiently packed space, with one bedroom, when you offer to take on a family of four you are well on the way to sainthood. When we explode in your living room, you will know what I mean. Our suitcases can give you some indication of the mess that will ensue, but seeing is believing.
Tea was served, and the calming process had begun.
The next morning, we head to a big museum in San Francisco (which the name failed to make an impact on me, because we never went in) and I got to see what a large mass of humanity can look like. We all had one common goal, to get into this museum on free day.
I have never seen a line grow in front of me like I did that day. It was a long line, but since we had 4 kids with us, (friends joined in) we were actually walking slower than the growing line. By the time we got to the end, it was going to be a 1.5 hour wait to just get IN. That was not happening for us, so we just kept walking and ended up at a park chock full of kids running around with sand, mud, slides, and full sun. There was even a carousel, but we didn’t go on it. Lunchtime came, and we decided to bail on the whole city experience. We went back to the Oakland palace, ate lunch, and tried to unwind.
Later that afternoon, we went to see Bill Denham’s printing press in Oakland. Bill Denham actually went to high school with June Smith, who is Zac’s mom. June has great taste, and when she tells us something is going to be interesting, I usually listen (can’t vouch for Zac).
I don’t know much about letter pressing, but from a fairly uneducated point of view I will say that the old machine press was seriously beautiful, and the inking process, and plate making, and paper scraps laying around left me with a sense of peace, like this is a place where slow, beautiful things are still happening, where things of quality occur, a place of care. You could get your Zen on hanging out with Bill. He had poetry on the walls, and the woman he shares this space with was an artist who had painted and created all sorts of detailed, mind-blowing works hanging about. And she had two kids, which certainly worked in our favor, as there were toys on the floor, so when the kids had gotten their fill of “this is how it all used to happen”, they could zone out with some brightly colored plastic things that made music. I enjoyed watching the machine work, just so beautiful. It reminded me of a time when things were a lot more difficult to come by, when we didn’t all have an ink jet printer on our desks and a computer to do mediocre work constantly by. But then my cell phone rang and I forgot it all, and hurried back to Walgreens to pick up my digital camera prints.
Just kidding about that, but seriously, the modern attention span is truly disappointing.
What?
What is she doing?
That night we went back to Moez’s and hung out on the back patio, and ate salmon and laughed and cajoled about naughty dogs, cute kids, (or was it cute dogs and naughty kids?) and what we have and haven’t done in the past 10 years. My list was pretty long.
After breakfast the next day we transferred to Chicken John’s warehouse in the Mission down in the big COLD city. Moez was nice enough to drive us, which even though we love public transportation, one cannot deny the convenience and speed of driving a car.