Cool Blogger Meet Up!

I got together with Birchie! And San! We had Tapas!

As you may know, Birchie was in California recently, and split her time between Sacramento and San Francisco. So I drove to Sacramento last Tuesday after work to meet her for dinner, so we could also meet up with San. When I got there, San was still at work, so I picked Birchie up at her AirBnB, and we went to a little park nearby. The main attraction is Sutter’s Fort, which is one of the first European colonial forts in the Central Valley of California, before the Gold Rush, but it was closed, so we couldn’t go inside.

That was fine, we walked around and admired ducks and turtles and fountains. I tried to turn the picture of the turtle for you, but since I have it in the gallery, it doesn’t want to turn. C’est la vie.

After a bit, we heard from San that she was home from work, and we picked her up, and then went to one of her favorite restaurants, Tapa the World. I can see why it’s a favorite! They had both indoor and outdoor seating, and we chose to sit outside in a little courtyard. The service was good, and the food was delicious! We eschewed larger dinner plates and instead shared tapas, which are small appetizer sized servings. It seems like we’re all pretty much omnivores, so we had their delicious bread with a balsamic/garlic dipping sauce, empanadas, mushrooms in garlic/wine/parsley, fried eggplant, and Kobe beef. Everything was excellent, but I think my favorite items were the eggplant and the empanadas. We didn’t take any pictures of our food, we are clearly not food bloggers.

We neglected to take a group photo until it was dark and the lighting was bad and the staff had to take our picture so we would finally leave and let them close up for the night, but we’re cute anyway. Also, we didn’t pick a very pretty backdrop.

The thing is, as always, meeting bloggers that you know online is AWESOME. Birchie and San IRL are just as they are on their blogs. Funny and interesting and smart and opinionated and just what you want in a friend and dining companion. Highly recommended.

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OK, wow, I went in to wordpress to write this post, and it looks like I started it last week. I guess I started out blogging about Sacramento, and then decided to not post anything until I had gotten all of my visits in, especially since Ted and I were gone for the weekend. So much has happened in the last week (meaning, busy busy fun fun).

The trip to visit San and Birchie was on Tuesday, and then on Thursday, Birchie was moving from Sacramento to San Francisco. That’s kind of a pain in the ass on public transportation (though she had managed most of it in reverse going from SFO to SAC), so I thought I would work a half day, and she could take Amtrak from Sacramento to the station closest to me, which is Martinez. We could have lunch, tour the John Muir Historic Site, and then go to San Francisco via the Golden Gate Bridge. So that’s what we did!

Here we are in front of a lovely pomegranate bush, which shows nothing of the John Muir Historic Site, nor of our delicious lunch. We dined at Roxx on Main, which is the only restaurant I know in Martinez. They have an excellent veggie burger, which the chef took years to develop. The chef trained with Alice Waters from Chez Panisse, so she knows her stuff. Ted works in Martinez and often gets the burger, so I’ve tasted it, but my heart remains with the roasted turkey and avocado. If you’re ever in Martinez, I highly recommend Roxx on Main, and FYI, they host live music most Thursdays through Sundays in the evening, though we haven’t been.

This is the historic house where John Muir and his family lived for the last years of his life. Yes, we went up to the attic and yes, we got to ring the bell. Is it a fabulous attraction? No, I’d say 7/10 (a solid C) but add in time chatting and exploring with Birchie bumps it to a 10/10.

From there we drove to San Francisco via the Richmond bridge, through Marin County, and then over the Golden Gate Bridge. YAY for beautiful weather, because when San Francisco is having a good day, she’s glamorous. I thought it might be cool to show Birchie our beautiful Palace of Fine Arts, which was built for the Panama Pacific International Exposition, when the City wanted to show the world that they were back after the devastating earthquake and fire of 1906. Fun fact for Little House fans, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter Rose lived in San Francisco in 1915, and Laura came and visited her, and they visited the expo, so she would have seen this same beautiful structure. The exhibition hall used to house The Exploratorium, but that moved to a more appropriate site in 2013. There is also a small theater, where I saw the only opera I’ve ever attended, The Marriage of Figaro. Anyway, it’s a really pretty part of town. We walked around the lake and scoped out houses to decide where we might want to purchase one for future blogger meet ups. You know, if we won the lottery. We saw lots of birds and turtles. Then we went to Chrissy Field, which is a little beach on the Bay, with a beautiful view of the GG Bridge.

Apparently I did not take any photos from Chrissy Field, so here is a very old one of Maya playing in the waves way back in the early aughts. Once you get through the Golden Gate and visit the ocean, the waves are much larger and not really safe, so this is a great option if you want to get your feet wet in the cold briny water.

From there we went and got Birchie settled into her AirBnB, then explored the neighborhood, which was perfectly located a few blocks north of Golden Gate Park. We took a walk to see what was nearby, and it turned out that she was close to a restaurant I’d always been curious to try, Pacific Cafe, which is known for their seafood. A glass of wine and some fresh oysters sounded really good to us, so off we went. They didn’t have any oysters on their menu, so we ordered some clam chowder, some Caesar salad, and some scallops to share, along with some wine. The clam chowder was SO meh, and we were not hungry enough for meh food, so we sent it back. Everything else was delicious.

Birchie had her own adventures over the weekend, and I had mine (more on that later!), and on Tuesday I worked for a few hours, then picked her up, and we went to explore what little I know of the Peninsula. We started out with sandwiches at a little cafe (delicious!) and then moved on to our real objective. Anne mentioned once how much she loved Filoli Gardens when she spent time in the area, and a coworker mentioned it to me a month or so ago, so we decided to check it out.

The house and gardens were stunning, and again, we had perfect weather. It was warm but not hot.

Some kind strangers took our photo…I wish I had taken off my hat. It was a very sunny day!

Beautiful gardens, fancy house. We picked out my home office, but as we did not have access to the upstairs, we could not pick out bedrooms. We considered buying the house for future blogger meetups, but shockingly, there are no upstairs balconies from which to enjoy a cup of tea or a cocktail while visiting, so we declined to make an offer.

After that we visited the Pulgas Water Temple, which is the terminus point for water that flows from the Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite and brings water to San Francisco and several other Bay Area cities. This was a big deal, ensuring water in such an arid place, back after the earthquake of 1906 (again with the earthquake!), so they built a little temple. It’s a pretty place to take pictures, and we saw several graduates and a young girl posing for quinceañera photos. Apparently I didn’t take any photos here, so I lifted one from the website. There is a nice hike you can take that would have been lovely, but I wore the wrong shoes.

Instead, we went to San Bruno Burlingame and walked around a bit, then found a spot to have a snack while waiting for traffic to let up a bit for my drive home. Years ago I had lunch with an old timey blogger friend, Tracy, and some IRL and URL friends, at a nearby Mexican restaurant. (Tracy is going to come up again in another post soon, which is why I mention her here.) That place closed maybe 10 years ago, but I figured it might be a nice place to walk around and find a restaurant. I remember it as being little independent shops, and it is not that, it is all chain stores. Whether it was chain stores back in 2009, I don’t remember. Anyway, we found a Michelin recommended Indian restaurant, Rasoi, and had a snack and a drink. In addition to the pakoras and samosas shown with Birchie and her yummy Cosmo, we had tandoori wings which were messy but really good.

After I dropped Birchie off at her airport hotel, I was reminded of why I am thankful that I do not have to commute. There was a fire on one of the BART lines earlier in the day, which meant that a lot of folks drove to work who normally would not, so traffic was very heavy, even though I waited until close to 8:00 to leave for home. I liked this mural I spotted while waiting for traffic to move.

My final review of time spent with blog friends is 1,000/10. We all ‘know’ each other, though of course there are stories that we don’t tell on our blogs. But we feel comfortable enough, and we’re nosey enough, that we can share lots of little details about our lives. When the three of us were together last week, I asked a personal banking type question, and I prefaced it with, ‘if this is too personal, please feel free to not answer’, and Birchie said, ‘I challenge you to ask a question we will not answer.’ HA! So yeah, we talked about separate checking accounts vs joint within a marriage, do you ask for a receipt when you buy something (I do, but often I then just throw them away without looking at them), do you balance your checkbook, have you ever tried noise cancelling headphones, what is your favorite ice cream flavor, on and on. Lots of talk about dogs, about Mulder and Stepdog and Doggo. We could have talked forever I think. I highly recommend time with Birchie and San if you can manage it.