We're not flower show kind of people

For a Bay Area apartment, I'd say that we have pretty nice yard: a patio with grill, a deck, some citrus trees and lots of furry little creatures. We also have some huge flower beds that have been totally molested by weeds. This year, we decided to take control of the clutter and try our hand at gardening. After a few weeks, (almost) everything is still alive!

With our newly-found green-thumbness, we decided to go to the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show at the Cow Palace this past weekend. Add that to the list of things we never need to go to again.

For over $40 in admission and parking, we had the amazing opportunity to purchase the same pretty flowers we can find at the local nurseries...in fact, most of the places we usually go to were actually there! I guess there's the added bonus of seeing the flowers arranged in extravagant, professionally landscaped gardens that we will never be able to afford. We did get free Kahlua...after giving all of personal information to the Man.

Until we buy our own house (when the cows come home), we're sticking to the local Ace Hardware Garden Center and Annie's Annuals in Richmond for our cheap annuals.

Whoopin' it up in the Financial District

Last Friday we decided to live on the edge. Our friends had a babysitter for their one-year-old son, and were meeting us for drinks after work in San Francisco. I think we were all desperate for some adult fun, so we decided to go bar hopping in the Mission Financial District! WHAT?

We had fun too, let me tell you. We met at One Market for drinks after work, only to be confronted with a bar full of half-drunk boring lawyers/businesspeople/stiffs wearing suits - on a FRIDAY? This is San Francisco people. It seemed like a perfectly fine restaurant, but too fancy and too loud for us. Instead we strolled across the street car tracks to Market Bar in the Ferry Building. Within five minutes we were seated with a bottle of cheap (and tasty!) Austrian wine and an overpriced cheese plate. After a long week of work, I need a table at a decent restaurant, friends, and a bottle of wine (noticing the wine pattern around these parts? Man I'm a lush).

The wine caught up with our almost-empty stomachs, so we let Market Bar and got more wine, duh. Little known secret - Taylor's Refresher only charges $1 corkage. $1 gets you 4 real wine glasses, a silver tray, and the cork sucked out of your wine bottle. Add this to a relatively cheap burger, fries, and onion rings, and you're in heaven. And that's before the heart attack.

The Ferry Building isn't exactly bustling at 8pm on a Friday, but the wine bar was definitely open and Slanted Door was busy. Mental note to try the wine bar out sometime...

After we were kicked out of Taylor's (because they were closing) we really felt the pressure. Late nights in the Financial District should not be attempted by amateurs. The street was pretty dark, and the sidewalks were pretty much deserted, but the shining beacon atop the Hiatt called out to us. You have to have a sense of humor before going to Equinox, San Francisco's only spinning restaurant. It's on the 20-something floor of a hotel surrounded by 30-something floor buildings. You do the math.

Another round of cocktails and we were ready for a pretty crappy dessert. Who cares? We were drunk by then anyway. I think we enjoyed the Cockburn Port the best. Cockburn Port, the city spinning around us, a whole evening with our friends...you just need to be a little creative to find the fun in the Financial District.

Going to Napa for something other than wine?!

After a crazy busy holiday season, we're finally excursioning around the Bay Area again! Sitting on the couch was nice for a while, but it finally came time to spread our wings and hop in the car. This past Saturday we trekked to COPIA - The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts. How California can you GET?

Admission in the month of January is totally free - and I can see why. There was almost nobody there. It was like walking into the conference room floor of a hotel: nice art on the walls, a beautiful view, and a few really interesting exhibits...but that was about it. You could pay for a wine tasting or try freshly-squeezed OJ from a very well-advertised juicer. The cafe was closed for renovations. The exhibit hall was actually very interesting - lots of cool historical information about food, food products, and American cuisine, but I can't say that it really warranted the hour drive.

In retrospect, COPIA would have been a lot more fun if we would have planned to attend one of the many classes they offer - cooking, wine tasting, gardening. We showed up expecting to be entertained, only to realize that we probably should have planned out our entertainment before coming.

The building and gardens were beautiful, and the color-organized kitchen utensils in the gift shop was quite amusing. Next time we go to COPIA, I think we'll TRY to go when it is crowded and busy...then it might not seem quite so slow. Visiting a winery may have been a lot more exciting on a sparse winter weekend.

Feed the Guests

When we have guests visit from around the country, dinner choices become a week-long discussion weighing "uniqueness" against "comfort". Many of our guests don't have the adventuresome restaurant choices in their hometowns that we have in the Bay Area. An out-of-town guest restaurant should be fun and original without scaring the guest! Here is our list of favorite restaurants to take out-of-town guests. We'll keep updating it as we get more ideas!

Chow (SF) - Comfort food at its best, and really cheap! This place is the best for a comfortable, reasonably priced dinner with a little SF flair. The open-air patio in back and exposed kitchen give this place plenty of character to start a conversation. (Yelp)

Cafe de la Paz (Berkeley) - Fun second-floor restaurant overlooking the Gourmet Ghetto of North Berkeley. Looking down on the Gourmet Ghetto for half the price of take-out across the street at Gregoire. Not Bad. (Yelp)

Yoshi's (Oakland) - Go for a show, or just go for dinner, or just go for wine/sake and sushi. You actually get to take off your shoes and sit on the floor. Bring the whole family. (Yelp|Reservations)

Yosemite Road Trip! (Part 2)

Continued from Yosemite Road Trip! (Part 1)

Tip #2: Pack all food, toiletries, and water in a separate bag from your clothes.

Since we didn't follow Tip #2, we were stuck at the car until 1 am sorting our toiletries. Funny the bear in the movie looked like it was tearing apart our car...as soon as we turned to sleepily wobble to our tent, a huge bear saunters across the parking lot 100 feet in front of us. Not a welcome site. After waiting out the bear sighting from the front seat of our fortress, er, Chevy Aveo, we decide to make a break for our bunker, er, canvas tent.

On our second attempt to just get some sleep after our long drive, we were welcomed into the campground by shouts of "BEAR!" coming from all over. Not in the mood. At all. After a few tears, cussing, and thoughts of leaving right then and there, we survived the first freezing cold night.

Tip #3: Sleeping bags don't keep the cold out if they aren't zipped up/zipped together. Especially when it's 35 degrees.

So, by now you've realized we're not the most experienced campers. Funny that I always ask for camping gear for gifts. Maybe it makes me feel more outdoorsy.

After a nice long rest (until 11am) the second day was a zillion times better than the first waking up under the eye of half dome and brisk autumn day. Instead of braving the tourists in the Valley, we drove one hour south to Mariposa Grove to see the Sequoia forest. On the way we stopped to see Bridalveil Falls, one of the few waterfalls still flowing in October. The short hike was worth the time to see a light mist spraying over the precipice above.

We have tall redwoods in the Bay Area, but these trees were just beasts. We passed on the $16 tram ride and decided to take a short hike up to see the sites. It was a busy trail, but much less busy than the bustle of activity in Yosemite Valley. And the car trip there and back was equally breathtaking.

We decided to drive to Glacier Point to see Yosemite Valley from above. The short half-hour drive leads to a point directly above the visitor's center in the Valley below; it was as if we were in an airplane looking out over the mountains, and it was such a clear day. The Sierras just went on and on in every direction. This short drive was definitely the highlight of our trip.

We grabbed dinner back at Curry Village with the rest of civilization. The lounge/lodge/restaurant had all of the comforts of home: a fireplace, big leather couches, and the Cal football game opposite the National League playoff game on television. So much for getting away from reality!

Our second night was much less eventful with our lessons learned from the night before. We called it a night early to avoid any bear encounters. It was too cold to do anything anyway.

On our way back to the Bay Area we stopped by Hetch Hetchy Valley and O'Shaughnessy Dam. My wife claims I was slightly giddy as we drove up the deserted road to San Francisco's drinking water supply reservoir - maybe I was a little. Funny that we've both studied this place in school as a history major and an environmental engineer.

The Hetch Hetchy area of Yosemite was much easier to wrap our hands around than the main park. There were several great day hike trails (although we were too exhausted to try), not many people, and still an amazing view.

Tip #4: Get a National Parks annual pass. It's $50 and entering Yosemite is $20...and entering Yosemite again to see Hetch Hetchy is $20.

The only thing in my life that has compared to visiting Yosemite is visiting the Louvre in Paris. Both places are utterly unique and breathtaking and completely overwhelming. When we go again, we hope to rough it a little more during the day and pamper ourselves more at night. It is truly an amazing place that cannot be described through pictures or stories, but needs to be experienced first-hand in its harsh beauty.

Yosemite Road Trip! (Part 1)

After living in California for over two years, we finally decided to take a pilgramage to Yosemite National Park: the breathtaking, gradiose, and tourist ridden Sierra Nevada valley. We dissuaded ourselves from going in the past because we wanted to try to avoid tourist season. Well, it seems that there is a reason that more people come during the peak tourist season - it isn't 35 degrees at night with no heat in a canvas tent! More on that later...

Despite our best efforts to leave right after work from San Francisco, our plans were thwarted by the other half million people trying to escape the City for the long weekend.

Tip #1: Do not attempt to leave downtown San Francisco by car on a Friday afternoon. Everybody else is doing the same thing.

So, we were off to a great start...by 7:00pm we had made it all the way to Livermore for a gourmet dinner at Quizno's. We really just got off 580 to let the traffic die down, but we ran into Friday night high school orgy at the mall. And don't diss Quizno's - this is the staple of road-trip food!

The traffic had died down substantially as we zig-zagged across the central valley on Highway 120 arriving at the Curry Village registration desk just before midnight. The road into Yosemite was breathtaking: the full moon overhead lit up the granite valley walls with a spooky white shimmer that towered over us.

Arrival
We expected to be the last of the night to check-in to our tent cabin lodging, but it turns out that the entire Bay Area decided leave and arrive with us. The half-hour wait at the registration desk was thoroughly enhanced by the ten-minute "bear safety" video looping over the employees' heads.

"Do not leave food in your car. Do not leave food in your tent. We hope you didn't go to Quizno's on the way here because a bear will smell it and tear open the roof of your car like this...." --video showing bear tearing off the roof of a car like ours--

So, if a bear can do that to a car, what will it to our paper-thin, vinyl tent cabin walls? What if I smell like Quizno's?

Continued: Yosemite Road Trip! (Part 2)

RAIN!

The first rain in MONTHS has arrived! It smelled so good today coming out of the BART station - I'd trade smelly BO for wormy and moist any day! In all honesty, summers in the Bay Area can get a little boring - the same weather everyday with some fog thrown in here and there for fun.

In the land-of-two-seasons it is so refreshing to experience the transition. I saw more happy wet people today than I have in a long time.

We're headed to Yosemite this weekend to freeze our asses off in an unheated canvas tent cabin. Hopefully October will scare off all of the tourists and we'll have the whole place to ourselves - haHA! Expect a full report with pretty pictures when we get back.