Golden Gate Bridge
The week before last, I headed out west to visit my mom in Nevada. We spent one day at Lake Tahoe, swimming, sunning, and Shakespeareing. We saw Much Ado About Nothing, which was far better than last year’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The next day, we drove to Napa (by way of Fry’s Electronics) to visit friends Mark and Dawn. We weren’t there long enough to actually tour any wineries, but we did take a scenic drive through the vineyards.
Most of our time, though, was spent in the Bay Area. We again stayed with friends David and Francesca (and their daughter Maria) in Oakland. Our intent was to have a relaxing visit, so we spent quite a bit of our time there just hanging out and doing some shopping in Berkeley. I made a pilgrimage to the original Peet’s on Vine, and picked up a good supply of Molinari salame — one of my favorite foods in the world — at Genova Delicatessen. I also made a trip to Forrest’s for a bassoon pickup (more on that soon).
Sphinx Outside the de Young
My mom and I only went across the bay to San Francisco on one day, but we squeezed in quite a bit. We started off at the de Young Museum to see the traveling King Tut exhibit. We got there early, and managed to see much of it before the crowds arrived. The exhibit included many artifacts associated with Tutankhamun’s probable ancestors (his precise lineage is uncertain), as well as those from the tomb of the boy king himself. Unfortunately the most famous Tut artifact, his gold funeral mask, no longer travels outside Egypt. But there was certainly no shortage of other breathtakingly beautiful objects to see.
Golden Gate Park Band
We spent about an hour and a half working our way through the exhibit, then spent some time elsewhere in Golden Gate Park. We took a stroll through the Japanese tea garden, although since we’d just stopped at the de Young’s cafe, we didn’t actually have tea. Then, we walked over to the Temple of Music, where the Golden Gate Park Band was setting up for an afternoon concert. That afternoon’s concert consisted of all Broadway tunes, and we stuck around and listened for a little while.
Kiteboarder Under the Bridge
We’d brought a picnic lunch with us, and we drove out to the beach to eat it. It was overcast and hazy, but still nice to sit on the sand and enjoy the sea breeze during our meal. After lunch, we headed over to the Golden Gate Bridge. We parked at bridge level and walked down a steep path to the waterfront near Fort Point. The clouds were low enough to obscure the tops of the bridge’s towers, which made for some dramatic photo opportunities. Many sailing craft of all sorts were out on the bay that day, taking advantage of the brisk wind. We spotted a group of kite boarders zooming across the water. A couple of the more daring ones were playing under the bridge and even beyond it in the open ocean.
As usual, click the photos above for larger versions, or check out the whole gallery here. The gallery contains a panorama of the city across the bay I stitched together from five or six separate pictures. The version in the gallery isn’t very big, though. Here’s a much larger version.
