Family, food, and long, long walks...

Things are going well in San Francisco. Audiences are still loving the show & we're getting all kinds of great response. Last week our resident director was in town & we had the first full put-in for understudies. It was with full costume, lights, tech, and the entire band. Considering we understudies had only been through any scenes twice (and through the show as a whole only once) we did pretty well. And it's good to have gone through it once.

Meanwhile, we've been sampling some of the local fare. Up in Nob Hill, where we're living, it's a mostly residential neighborhood, but there are some restaurants that occupy the one, first floor corner unit. One of our favorites is Allegro Romano, situated on top of a nearby neighborhood called Russian Hill that slopes down in all four directions. They only serve dinner, and the host there chats with everyone, makes suggestions, fills everyone's glass with port at the end of the meal. Their prices are very reasonable, and there are probably only fifteen tables, so even if it's full, it just feels like a big family room.

On Saturday, my cousin Lisa, her husband Leonard, and their daughter Alyssa came to see the show. Afterwards, we all went out to The Grand Cafe, just a few doors down from the Curran Theatre, where we're performing. Great food (and a great selection of scotch). We had a really nice evening, and it was fun to spend some time getting to know this side of the family (Lisa is my Uncle Don's daughter), as I've never met Lisa (as an adult) before this week. Hopefully, Lisa & Alyssa (and Lisa's mom) are going to come back to see the show in a couple weeks. And it was fun for them to see their cousin-in-law do her thing (as I do the slacker thing downstairs)...

We had a great day off, this last Monday. At Lisa’s suggestion, we went to visit them in their grand palais in Tiburon, a gorgeous little community just over the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County. We drove up late Monday morning and went straight to Stinson Beach, a dog-friendly beach just west of Muir Woods.




We walked the whole length of the beach & back, encountering a sunbathing sea lion on the beach, just lying out. We thought it maybe looked a little thin & weary, but locals assured us that sometimes they just come & hang out, particularly when it's empty, like it was on Monday (one of the advantages of having Monday as your day off). (The flowers were left there by someone who wanted to beautify the sea lion's respite, apparently).



We spent the night at Lisa & Leonard's swank-ola pad, enjoying their jacuzzi for a late-night soak before nodding off at the unheard-of early hour of 11pm. That morning, we went for a hike in the hills just behind the house.



And also the view of San Francisco, from the summit of the hill.



It was a long, 2 1/2 hour hike, up the hill & over the other side. The whole weekend was really pretty, but that day in particular was a little warm. Not to mention how windy it was and how steep the climb. You can see here the view back at Lisa & Leonard's house. Lots of dramatic scenery along the way.




And man, Butley was WORN OUT when we got back.



Back into San Francisco Tuesday afternoon & we unloaded our things and one verrrry pooped pup back at the apartment & went to the show. Week Number Five, coming up...

Monday, September 22nd

Driving down Lombard Street

You've heard about it, Bill Cosby does a routine about it, but here it is, ladies and germs....

This week

We're settling into the routine a little here, finally. Now that we've opened, we've been able to focus on life beyond the show a little. Angie and I went to Sonoma and Napa last Monday on our day off. A nice trip and a chance to see the countryside just north of San Francisco. Some judicious sampling of the local wares was of course to be had. And we've been seeing various people. Jim's daughter Darci and her husband Chet came to see the show, and Angie and I visited my cousin Lisa up in Tiburon. Beautiful little town, and Lisa was a great tour guide. We meant to bring the car back to Berkeley Wednesday night, but I had understudy rehearsal and Angie did some sightseeing & shopping of her own, so we left the car on the street here outside our apartment. It's all perfectly safe, but unfortunately we left Angie's bike in the back seat, foolishly enough. And yes, in the morning, as Angie went to go get the car to take it out to park in Berkeley - sure enough, someone had smashed a rear passenger window and made off with the bike.

We knew better, and we're usually very good about it, but not that particular night. It's not like we're in a particularly crime-ridden part of town, and it was under a bright street light and all that, but these were clearly professionals, in & out in a flash. We're just lucky that they didn't try to rip the stereo out of the dashboard or take the car itself (we do have a club, but I know those are hardly infallible). And stuff like this is bound to happen with all the traveling we're going to be doing, so it's really just fortunate that nothing worse happened. Repair to the window didn't meet our insurance deductible, although Angie's bike is partially covered under our homeowners' insurance, so we'll look for a replacement at some point, a little poorer and a little wiser...

Butley coming back from Napa

Golden Gate Park & Lincoln Park cliff walk

Road Trip to San Francisco

The trip from San Diego to San Francisco couldn’t have gone much better. After the matinee on Sunday, we came home, having packed all our luggage, and loaded up the car. We got two big suitcases and some little things on the roof rack, two more in the back, plus some extra bags. We bought a seatbelt for the dog, a cooler for food & meds, hooked up the GPS on the dash and loaded plenty of music and podcasts on the iPod. We were now mobile.



An hour later, we were on the road with the goal of getting North of Los Angeles by the end of the evening, finding a Motel 6 somewhere & bunking down & then starting out the next day – which is exactly what happened.

We lucked out with traffic. Not much at all on Sunday – because it was the Labor Day holiday, people were still on vacation. Thanks to the digital age, we had a new route to take, Interstate 73 or something. Sweet little stretch of new California road which will, in ten years’ time, nonetheless be as choked with traffic as is every other ten-year-old (or more) road today.

Found a Motel 6 (one that had vacancies – took a little doing) in Goleta and crashed. The barest-boned of hotel rooms I’ve ever seen. Bed. Lamp. End Table. Bathroom. Phone. Certainly all we needed, though. And after a good nights’ sleep & a morning walk, we hit the road.

We took Highway 101 up to where it joins the US-1, the road which runs along the West Coast all the way from LA to Seattle. I’m sure it would be great to take it up to Seattle after San Francisco, but I don’t know that we’ll have time this trip. But because we had two & a half days to make the drive this time, it was worth taking the diversion. I’d never made the drive before and here’s the thing: it’s stupid, crazy gorgeous. My favorite thing was driving along some twisty little hairpin turn at the top of an enormous cliff overlooking the Pacific and seeing a mailbox & dirt driveway heading down the side of the cliff. People live there. In what are probably very old dwellings, worth millions nowadays, certainly, and sometimes they’re stunning mansions and sometimes they’re just lucky real estate deals from forever ago. In either case, it was fun to imagine a very different life with each passing mailbox.

Saw the Hearst Mansion in San Simeon, of “Citizen Kane” fame, known in that film as “Xanadu.” Didn’t walk around because it cost a lot, it’s a whole ticket-buying-toour-scheduling-non-dog-having-kind-of-thing, and we bought some lovely postcards in the gift shop.

So, some madly rich guy long ago built this big-ass house.
Bully for him.
We continued on.

Stopped in Morro Bay for a simple Mexican lunch. Very cool – one of a number of little communities that are just far enough away from anywhere that they’ve managed to avoid being bedroom communities and were settled long ago enough to avoid being over-built vacation spots, and so now they’re simple quiet places with a lot of retired folk that just happen to be along one of the most gorgeous stretches of American coastline.

Bully for them.
We continued on.

Big, thick kelp beds all along the coast. Football fields of kelp, floating in the surf, amidst random massive boulders and rock formations, still resisting the constant pounding of the surf.

Heavily wooded villages around Big Sur, complete with general stores and one room post-offices. And elsewhere, vast, hilly tracts of brown and gray patches testifying to the fires that burned all over here recently. But even these, by this point, just looked like hilly pastures, a little brown, but very full of life. One local even told us that not only are redwoods virtually fireproof (and the only remaining trees on some of these stretches), but redwood pinecones need the heat of a fire to finally open up – like they know there’s finally a need, so they set to work repopulating. Mother Nature, yet again amazing.

Stopped just South of Pebble Beach, and Butley had a good run around. Found a little cove (private beach? couldn’t tell – no signs or fencing – just a little isolated & near a fenced-in Victorian house) and let him off leash to run around. He’s going to miss the beach, that’s for sure. He may be only a serviceable swimmer, but he’s a full-on beach bum. By the way, he's already perfected his "Wake me when it's over..." attitude towards car travel.



We found ourselves making good time, so we just kept pushing on until we got to San Francisco at 10p, Monday night. Rolled in, unloaded, put the car in a garage for the night, ordered pizza at midnight, and conked out. A very successful trip, all the more so for having ended a day early and saving us the extra night at a hotel.

We’re staying in the Nob Hill Chateau, a corporate place. Perfectly comfortable and complete with the sounds of trolley cars passing every several minutes or so. It’s a little loud but fine and a regular reminder of where we are. The car, meanwhile, is living out in Berkeley, in front of Peter Foley’s parents’ house. We opted at the last minute to park it there instead of at my cousin Lisa’s because it’s a little easier to get to via the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). Peter’s dad will look after it for us, and it’s free, And where we are now, a car would be more of a liability than an advantage.

So – with Rice-a-Roni in the cupboard (well, we had to, didn’t we?) and sourdough bread in the pantry, we are now fully ensconsed. More photos and sight seeing to come. In the meanwhile, hope you enjoyed this little account of our first – of oh, so many – roadtrip…