BAY AREA

My stay in the Bay Area was primarily to spend a few days with my friend Deanna and her family, who Cynthia and I knew when we lived in California in the 70’s.  For those who don’t know the story, I met my wife when she walked into the Radio Shack I was managing in Oakland and bought a stereo (which I actually still own).  Deanna was actually her buddy.

We didn’t do much in the way of sightseeing, preferring to spend our time reminiscing or dancing at some of her favorite clubs.  She was constantly asking me if I remembered this or that, to which I could answer truthfully – no.  It’s been more than three decades, and I normally can’t remember last week.  One thing I was interested in was seeing if my first house still existed, which it did.  It really wasn’t much changed.  We paid $24.5 thousand for it in 1978, and sold it two years later for double that.  Our next door neighbors had always turned their noses up at us, being as prejudiced as my parents regarding interracial marriage, but we got the last laugh.  We sold it to a homosexual couple.

From 1979

 

And 2013

I did manage to get a parking ticket.  We had been out at a club and I was driving her to the airport at 4AM Thursday morning (she was going to a family reunion in Niagara Falls), so I crashed at her place for a couple of hours.  I didn’t see the sign that said no parking from 3AM to 6AM, so my rental car cost me an extra $66.  My only consolation was that there were a number of other cars with tickets, so maybe the meter maid had also been out clubbing and was getting a little work in before bedtime.

I did get over to San Francisco on one of the days of my trip.  I wanted to see the headquarters of M5, where Mythbusters is filmed.  When I got there I met a couple of very young fans who had actually met Adam Savage by chance, and were given signed pictures.  Nobody will ever mistake me for a little boy, so I only got this picture.  They don’t give tours, out of self-defense, otherwise they’d never get any filming done.  I actually had to fight my way through Giants traffic to reach their building, and there are many one-way streets which make getting around challenging for the novice.

I also went out to the Pacific to sort of put a coast-to-coast stamp on the journey.  At their rather prosaically named Ocean Beach, I got a few sunset shots of the bird rocks, but had an accident with my small digital camera.  I cracked the view-screen.  It can still take a picture, but you can’t see it.

And then I headed for the Zephyr to start the trip back home.