What I did On My Spring Vacation, Part Two

After I left San Francisco,  I headed up the coast.  My main destination was Arcata, CA- home of the hippies, but I made a side trip to Bandon, Oregon- a town with a Radio Hut, and some shoppes selling fudge and pirate-themed tchotchkes.  And a lovely coastline:

Then it was back on the 101 and down to Arcata.  What a great drive.  The road would run along the ocean, and then into a grove of redwoods, and then back to the ocean, and then through the mountains...   A-mazing.   

The next five days were spent in Arcata, just hanging out with my friend Jodie, her boyfriend, Jhon, and their daughter, Lillian.  There were trips to the redwoods:

And to the beach:

One afternoon, I was alone in their apartment and suddenly a feeling of vertigo came over me.  My first reaction was "Damn, my blood sugar's dropping.  I should eat something."  Then I got scared for a moment, then the feeling passed.  A few minutes later, it happened again.   I decided it was time to get out of the house and find Jodie.  I met her on the street a few blocks away and she asked if I had felt the earthquake.   Suddenly, the confusion & dizziness made much more sense.   4.0 on the Richter Scale.  

We went to the Humboldt Bay Coffee Company, where we saw beans being roasted and I bought the most delicious Peruvian blend:

Then it was time to drive back to San Francisco for my flight home.  Again, the 101 is an amazing drive- more redwood forests, wine country, Marin County, and then the Bay:

After the quickest check in I've ever experienced (seriously, I checked my bag and made it through security in 5 minutes), I settled in with an Entertainment Weekly to wait for my flight. A few minutes later, my friend Evan sat down next to me.  Turns out he was in San Francisco on business.  No matter where I go, I always find someone from New Jersey.  And that's the way I like it.

What I Did On My Spring Vacation, A Photo Essay in Several Parts

First stop, San Francisco, where I met the Larges:

We rode the cable cars and took the BART over to Oakland to see the Warriors get their asses handed to them by the Sonics.  

We went to Haight-Ashbury, where I bought a bunch of used CDs at Amoeba and eavesdropped on record store clerks geeking out over whatever record store clerks geek out over these days:

And can I say, I'm really proud of the fact that I don't care that I didn't know what the hell they were talking about.  I just marched up to the counter with Madonna's first album & Randy Newman's Little Criminals.  I also bought the new Magnetic Fields and an older Bonnie Prince Billy, lest you think I've gone soft.  Oh, and Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend, which I had on cassette and lost sometime in the mid-90s.   I think the clerk must have taken a shine to me, because there was an extra Bonnie Prince Billy CD in my bag.  Awesome.  Thanks, record store dude.  You were cute, in that record store dude way.

The line to get into the Trader Joe's in San Francisco is just as long as the one on 14th Street in NYC, except you wait in your car, rather than on the sidewalk:

Then we watched the sunset from the top of the Bank of America building:

Wow.  Pretty sweet, huh?   The next morning, I headed north.  I'll get to that tomorrow, since Blogger's being a pain in the ass with the image uploading.  Stupid Blogger.