curmudgeon classic

CURMUDGEON CLASSIC

VOLUME VI. CHAPTER 7

	courtesy NASA
			TB OR NOT TB

September 22, 2011

We’re starting to get emotional bedsores from staying home, and the Northern Relations have been hocking my china cup (if you don’t speak Yiddish, you can figure it out from the context) about visiting, so we are going up to Petaluma for a couple of days. We don’t leave for almost four weeks, but I thought I’d get an early start on the chronicle. To build suspense.

We had thought to rent a beach house in Cayucos and spend a week on the way back, but my stockbroker has convinced us that three days in a condo (an old Robert Redford spy movie, if you have a really long memory) will do just fine. We are also stopping one day in Monterey to visit the aquarium. I put off making the Monterey reservation until today when, mirabile dictu, the Times travel section had an article about cheap (relatively, of course) places to stay on the Monterey Peninsula. Needless to say the number one choice (Clint Eastwood’s place in Carmel) is booked, so we will be stopping near the famous Monarch butterfly hangout in Pacific Grove, just up the road from the aquarium. No butterflies are promised—they don’t show up until October—but who knows, it’s been a mild summer: maybe the bugs will think it’s fall already.

Dave and Anna are making plans for us. Plans! For us! We didn’t tell them what time we’d show up on Friday, so the schedule doesn’t start until Saturday, when we are to visit a restored sawmill followed by enforced socializing with their friends and Anna’s mom on Saturday night. Sunday we will all go down to check out the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, find someplace to eat (I bet they plan that, too) and then we will escape to Monterey and the aquarium. I like fish: they just swim around aimlessly, eat, and poop. Kind of like me.

We made our own plan, of sorts, for Friday. We are driving all day, stopping along the way to visit some very old friends (i.e., our age) for lunch. Admittedly not much of a plan, except that Lyman’s a brittle diabetic so we can’t just say we’ll eat whenever we show up; we need to be there at Lunch Time. That means we have to leave at 6:00 A.M. What kind of vacation is that?

Friday: we actually got off at 6:00, very possibly a record for a departure not involving an airplane, and missed all the morning traffic. Except for the artificial jam caused by the meter at the 210 on ramp, which had more cars backed up at the light than were on the freeway being metered. After that we made excellent time until the first place where they were fixing the road and the I-5 suddenly went from four to two lanes. By the time we got over the grapevine—normally a two-hour drive, we were already an hour behind schedule. Then it was smooth sailing for a good five minutes. A road sign advised tuning to 1610 AM for traffic info, so I did. The info was that the freeway ahead would be down to one lane “24 hours a day, 7 days a week” and long delays were expected. We had to detour through Bakersfield RIGHT NOW to get around it, but we made it. The detour was not bad, even with the road construction (yes, more. Wasn’t California supposed to be out of money?) until the turnoff to return to the I5. It was a nice, straight, already repaired line of blacktop, nominally 55 mph. Tell that to the cement truck ahead of us.

This took us through Wasco, home of Wasco State Prison, which I remembered because I was once sent to Wasco State Prison. To read the chest x-rays of the new inmates, he added hastily. It was made clear to me that they were not interested in an academic radiologist’s report. They wanted to know only one thing: did this recruit have TB or not? (Were you wondering how I was going to get to that?)

Thirty miles (one hour) later we rejoiced at the appearance of the onramp that would put us back on the freeway. Not so much at the sign at the foot of the onramp: “road construction ahead.”

Not too bad, and we got to Walnut Creek in time to eat something. Pat & Lyman are in a new place, one story now, and managing. Pat is not well, but no more rascible than ever, and Lyman is no less.

We worked out an elaborate route to get from Walnut Creek to the kids’ in Petaluma while avoiding the traffic. It involved going over the Benicia-Martinez bridge and cutting over on the 37 (you need to know that—be patient). Worked like a charm, no traffic anywhere, until we missed Lakeville, the turnoff from the 37. Ended up on Highway 101, THE road out of San Francisco, at 4:something on Friday afternoon. We drove north for two or three miles (about 20 minutes) until I saw an off-ramp for Atherton Rd. “Hey! We passed Atherton Rd on the 37! I’ll just take this back to the 37 and then, oh, why don’t we cut over on 37 to Lakeville?”

I would now like to insert a brief email exchange I had with Anna before we left:

You might want to consider heading north on 680 off of 580, then going 780-80-37-Lakeville. 101 north gets bad early on Fridays, people heading north for the weekend. Google Maps Traffic says you'll still hit some slowdown on 80 in Vallejo, but you miss Oakland and the maze and 101 north. Still good to come in early.

FYI, 37 east from 101 to Lakeville will be deadly - it's a big cut-over to Sacramento, and hence Tahoe. I am only recommending 37 west from 80.

- A

We're not going east on 37, why should we care how bad the traffic is there?

-m

East on 37: Just in case you ended up coming up 101 for some reason and were like, oh, why don't we cut over on 37 to Lakeville from here? That's why not.

- A

She was right. I remembered the instant I saw the 37 east. Too late. Eventually we got back to Lakeville and were confronted with this: “Expect 20-minute delays.” We did expect that. Of course we expected that: haven’t you been paying attention? Then we saw the next sign: “Falling Trees.” What we got was a view of lots of heavy equipment, large tree stumps, and 35-minute delay. And after that a lovely trip down Lakeville Rd. We passed (I think I’ve mentioned this in a previous chapter but I don’t feel like looking it up so, what the hell, here it is again) a sign for “Old Lakeville Rd. 3,” which you might think meant that Old Lakeville Rd. was 3 miles on. But no, it meant that this road, right here, is Old Lakeville Rd. 3. A half-mile along we came on Old Lakeville Rd. 3—the other end of a short loop. This was followed by Old Lakeville Rd.2, OLR 2 again, followed by…WRONG! It’s Cannon Rd. Both OLR1s come after that.

OK, we got there. The kids are good. Next morning we all drove up the road to Sebastopol (actually Occidental, but even people who know where Sebastopol is never hear of that) for the tour of Sturgeon’s Mill, a sawmill built in the 19th century, moved to its present location in 1923, and shut down 40 years later. In 1993 the descendants of the old owners decided to invest $700 and restore the mill. It’s been slow, but the old steam engines are up and running and open for public tours 4 weekends a year. This is our weekend.

It was wonderful fun, with the Big Saw (actually two 4-foot blades, one on top and one on the bottom) cutting enormous logs into lumber and producing a truckload of sawdust every hour. After the tour, my loving family dragged me, kicking and screaming, away from the barbecue to eat lunch someplace else.

Dave and Anna have a goldfish named Gomez who is so old he has gone completely white and doesn’t move. They assure me his is still alive, and it must be true because he does manage to hover in the middle of the tank. The tank has one of those aerators that bubbles all day long. It’s a wonder these people don’t have to pee every half hour.

Just so you won’t think I’m leaving out something on The Schedule, the enforced socialization was entirely tolerable.

Sunday was Academy of Sciences day. Last time we were here, they wouldn’t let us in for the nitpicking reason that the building wasn’t finished. Now it is. The roof is sod, with plants all over and 7 humps meant to evoke the 7 hills of San Francisco. Looked more like 7 big humps to me.

For a major, zillion-dollar museum, some of it was remarkably tacky: plastic bamboo, plaster whale skeleton, painted environment. But what you really come for, the geckos and spiders, butterflies and frogs from all over the world, is very cool indeed. And, forgive me for noticing, the small animal cages were made from very nice, very expensive zebrawood. You’d think they’d have mentioned that in the brochure.

When our feet wore out, we hugged the kids and headed off to Monterey. We got to the Butterfly Grove Inn without incident, or at least none we noticed until after we arrived. We have a tire that looks about half flat. The tires have all of 600 miles on them. I know it would be unconventional, but I’m wondering if the crews were using nails for some of those road repairs. Tomorrow we will have to stop at the tire store before the aquarium opens….

The BGInn is nicer than we deserve: open beam cathedral ceiling (redwood, of course), fireplace, skylight, microwave, fridge. The skylight is in the bathroom, which is larger than most “suites” at Motel 6 and has a big, roll-in (did I mention it’s handicapped-accessible?) shower. Real tile, even—none of this plastic crap. And no mildew. Before we left in the morning I wandered into the woods in back (“Don’t go in there,” said Jeanine, who decided to wait in the car.) and nearly stumbled over a fawn. The poor thing was so terrified, he climbed up onto his spindly little legs and ran a good ten feet before stopping to check me out. We had a brief conversation and I went on another few yards before meeting his mother, who was equally skittish of human contact. Eat your heart out, wife.

Whatever I can say about the Monterey Bay Aquarium has already been said, by me or somebody else, and I can add no more this trip. They have probably the largest collection of jellyfish in the world, and they are advertising the upcoming jellyfish exhibit, scheduled for March. I don’t know how they plan to outdo themselves. I took some blurry pictures of fish and we hit the road for Cayucos. Got clear past Carmel (what, 10 miles?) before our first “Road Work Ahead” sign. For the next 115 miles the “Road Work Ahead” and “End Road Work” signs were about equally spaced. Google underestimated our travel time by a (not very) good 30%.

The Shoreline Inn in Cayucos is the same as ever, except we got the “full ocean view” room instead of “oceanfront.” The difference is that we have to stand at the window to see anything, and the view then is roughly equal parts pier, the building next door, and the sewer effluent. But it’s a nice, big room with all the amenities of a nice big room. Including big, bad art on the walls. When they were remodeling a few years back I offered them a great deal on Cayucos ocean-themed photographs, but they foolishly opted for their grandchildren’s interpretation of seagulls and boats and stuff instead. Too late now.

We arrived in the middle of a Red Tide, which is actually about the color of orange soda. It looks like a big oil slick, but the wrong color. The orange patches are surrounded by dead jellyfish—not a pretty sight. Fortunately the fog makes it all hard to see.

We kept running into (figuratively speaking) a bunch of bicyclists all the way down the coast. It seemed like the same group over and over, and indeed it turned out to be so. It’s an 8-day ride from San Francisco to Santa Monica to benefit the Arthritis Foundation.

There’s a new (ish) restaurant in town, on the corner of Main and Not Main, Chez Frou-Frou. It’s open from Thursday through Sunday, which means it will remain a mystery. Just as well: it’s rated $$$$$ and anyway I don’t eat at places that serve stuff like “cotechino, jamon, and Mishima and Hearst Ranch bresaola….” (If you’re wondering: pork sausage, ham, and beef jerky.) It’s the only restaurant I’ve ever seen with weeds on the menu (they call it “garden oxalis,” which I’ve spent half my life trying to kill and never intend to eat) and though I’m intrigued by the dessert they call “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer,” even that turns out to be just silly: bourbon persimmon beignet, fruitcake with scotch ice cream, vanilla bean stout pots de crème. I’ve made goat cheese ice cream (more than once), and even I wouldn’t touch scotch ice cream. I wish them well but can’t help wondering what will be in that space when we come back next year.

Speaking of food, you may recall from last time that Taco Temple, unlikely though it seems, had a dessert that was to die for: peanut butter cheesecake. If you read the calorie/fat info, you realize that “to die for” is not merely a figure of speech. Be that as it may, I was willing to take the risk. Unfortunately, they don’t have it all the time, and they don’t know (or won’t let on) until opening time. They didn’t have it on Monday. Closed on Tuesday. Not on Wednesday. The hell with ‘em. On Thursday we had had enough, and went home to see if there was any sun.

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect--well, yes, come to think of it, I guess they do.