Those of us who live in one of the world’s tourism areas commonly observe that we don’t visit the local attractions because, after all, they’re always there and we can do it some other day. Out-of-town visitors provide the principal impetus for us to break out of our rut and see more of where we live. A visit from brother Dan and his wife Ginger gave us just that opportunity this past week and provided us with the excuse for a vacation at home.
It’s not easy to narrow down the attractions of the Bay Area to six days, particularly if you don’t want to exhaust a group of people who are all over 60. So we got a list from them of their desiderata and put in a few of our own. Things started off on a Saturday afternoon with a car tour of Oakland, where we live, including Lake Merritt, of course, and one of our own favorites, Middle Harbor Park. This is a shoreline park with a great view of San Francisco wedged into the Port of Oakland. The port itself, with its huge cranes for handling container ships (said to be the inspiration for the giant walkers in Star Wars) looms at either end; but the park stretches far enough along the shore to have its own sense of open air and holiday within sight of the working world.
Jon treated our guests to a Sunday morning car tour of San Francisco, including a drive down the twisty part of Lombard Street. They also visited Bernard Maybeck’s great Palace of Fine Arts, Alamo Square with its “painted lady” Victorian houses, and the Presidio with its view of the Golden Gate. The afternoon we devoted to a walking tour of our neighborhood, which has several excellent restaurants and interesting shops.
On Monday, we braved the (welcome) showers to visit the two big San Francisco cathedrals that form such a contrast to each other. Both are impressive, but Grace is Episcopal and Gothic while St. Mary’s is Roman Catholic and ‘sixties modern. The architectural contrast is about more than simply design. The Gothic style is interested in detail and diversity, in out-of-the way nooks and crannies, in things that cannot quite be seen but only glimpsed and half-imagined. The modern style of the sixties is much more unitary. There is relatively little of individual interest, but rather a single centralized space dominated by its concrete canopy. Both style make an impression. My own taste votes for the quirkiness of the Gothic, at least for a sacred building. A late lunch at the Cliff House rounded out the morning. The sun had come out. There were a few surfers down below on Ocean Beach. And the food was good—in fact, a great deal better than one has any right to expect at such a spectacular location.
Tuesday was focused on Muir Woods, a place almost as impossible to describe as it is to photograph. There is hardly any way to convey the height of the ancient trees in a forest of coast redwoods. The place is damp and cool and relatively quiet, even with so many visitors. And there is no place else on earth quite like these forests, though the karri trees of Western Australia have a majesty that comes close.
Wednesday was Alcatraz day. The trip there requires advance planning, since tickets sell out quickly. A ferry takes you to the island, where you can then wander pretty much at will till the last ferry leaves for San Francisco in the late afternoon. The walk uphill to the penitentiary proper is good exercise. On the way, you pass the ruins of earlier incarnations of the place, beginning with its role as fortress defending the Golden Gate in the 1850s and prison for Confederate sympathizers in the 1860s.
Neither Jon nor I had been to Alcatraz before. I had read about the rehabilitation of the gardens, and they were indeed rewarding. Even in the quiet garden time of November, they were still interesting and attractive with their variety of succulents. And the views from the island are incomparable. Even the prison itself proved more interesting than we expected, given that neither of us is an aficionado of “true crime.”
Thursday, we all went to Napa, where my sister Wanda has a small vineyard called “Miller’s Pond” in the Coombsville AVA. The day included a drive to St. Helena and lunch at the wonderful Farmstead restaurant, where much of the food is grown onsite. We tasted wine at one winery on the way back from lunch while Dan, who prefers beer, waited patiently until that particular bit of the trip was done with. Then a visit to Whole Foods for the ingredients of a light supper at Wanda’s farm.
At that point Ginger announced that she had been able to check off everything on the list of what she had most wanted to see, which gave us Friday as a day devoted mostliy to rest and recovery—with lunch at Zachary’s Pizza, a Rockridge mainstay.
It was a vacation for us, I think, as much as for Dan and Ginger. It’s even taken us a couple of days to “re-enter” our routines, much as if we had been somewhere far away for that time.