78 Hours In Silicon Valley - My Brother Comes for a Visit

My brother Josh came to see me a couple of weeks ago. I wanted the optimum mix of novelty, conversation, and beer. I came up with enough to fill a week. Or two. Complex Excel spreadsheet were involved. Here’s how it went down, a la the New York Times “36 hours in…”

SATURDAY 

11 am.

1. Lunch For All Tastes

There are over 50 restaurants on Castro Street in Mountain View. By definition, the entire Silicon Valley is a Mountain View. Castro Street has multiple Mexican, Italian, Indian, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Greek and American restaurants, to pick a view. We chose a greek restaurant called Ephesus. It was quiet on a Saturday afternoon and the food was delicious. While our food was prepared, I made Josh fill out some complicated questionnaires so we could start planning our days.

After lunch we walked the length of Castro street just to get some fresh air and exercise. Josh took photos of Le Boulanger, a bakery chain in the bay area. On the way back we passed Bier Haus - a favorite beer garden of mine - and saw we had just missed the free beer they were serving to celebrate their new name. Or not. The co-owner in - lederhosen - informed us the free beer was still flowing. I had a half-liter of delicious WinterBraun from Lost Cost. We realized we were sitting next to a guy I’d met on a previous afternoon at the same place. That’s a beer garden!

After the free beer we sampled the espresso at Red Rock coffee. If you like your expresso sour, this is the place for you. I needed chocolate truffles with mine.

1 pm

2. Nice to Mead You

We took a 30 minute ride on the light rail to the Rabbit’s Foot Meadery. Mead is anything brewed from fermented honey, whether it be wine, beer, or cider. Josh had the tasting flight: 2 wines, 2 beers, 3 ciders, and the Chocolate Raspberry Love port. I had a couple pints of Death By Raspberry, which is Raspberry Cider with a splash of Raspberry Mead wine and the Chocolate Raspberry port. The tasty room staff are as eclectic as the hip office park location.

7 pm

3. Hot Hot Pot

If you have to wait 30 minutes for a table, it must be a good place. Shabuway on Castro Street did not disappoint. The thin-sliced lamb that you cook yourself in a boiling pot of miso broth is a delight on a cool evening. Maybe we shouldn’t have made it spicy, since they’re serious about it. At least it cleared out our sinuses.

SUNDAY

10 am

4. Grown Here

There must be a dozen Farmers Markets in the bay area, with vendors coming from all over California. Campbell is known for having one of the best.  Josh took photos of the stands and their arrangements as research. I took photos of colorful stuff. We hadn’t eaten breakfast before the market, so it was nice to get lots of samples: grapes, apples, and pluots (plum-apricot hybrids); cookies, hummus, and pie. Mmmm…pie. The bakery had a sign that read “I’m pie-curious”. At another bakery we had to ask what an epi was. (A denser baguette, baked to look like a wheat stalk.)

As the samples wore off we needed real sustenance - aka brunch. We decided on Aqui Cal-Mex. Josh got a fancy burrito. I had the turkey meatballs with mashed sweet potatoes and a polenta cake. And a mimosa with frozen margarita in the center.

Noon

5. Honky Tonk Blues

Up until the ‘80s, the entire Silicon Valley was orchards. Entertainment was Honky Tonk bars, like Saddle Rack. It has since moved out of the valley to Fremont, and is usually filled with city-folk celebrating a birthday or bachelorette party. Today there was a country dance lesson event. We met a couple of my Reno trip friends. After a line dance lesson, Josh worked on the beginner 2-step while I tried my hand at the intermediate class. After the lessons we stayed for a few hours dancing to whatever songs the DJ selected.

4 pm

6. Garden City

San Jose was once known as the Garden City. There are several new churches springing up to minister to the vast and divers population. Josh accompanied me to Garden City church and met all my church friends, who were all really excited to meet him as well. 

6 pm

7. House of Yards

The Yard House has a huge beer selection and gets its name from the half-yards of beer they serve. The six of us from church stuck to pints. Josh got to try some new dark beers that he really enjoyed. After dinner we walked past the fancy shops that make up the Santana Row outdoor mall.

MONDAY

9 am

8. Just Peaking

The Bay Area has tons of parks, “open spaces” and other areas to hike full of forests and mountains. Mission Peak in Fremont offers a well traveled path up to an amazing vista of the bay, the valley, and the Santa Cruz mountains. It’s 3 miles to the peak, and the weekends can be crowded, but the weekday was much quieter. We saw - and heard - cattle on the way up. Then we saw a fox. I still don’t know what the fox says. Then we heard the chirping of a smoke detector with a dead battery. Turns out it was actually a ground squirrel - probably on sentry duty, warning about the fox. Later on we saw a falcon perched on a fence post. It looked like it was in the mood for some squirrel meal. The 6 mile round trip took just under 3 hours, giving us plenty of time for a range of conversation topics.

Noon

9. Ramen Without Styrofoam 

For lunch we chose an authentic Japanese Ramen spot called Dohatsuten. It had good reviews on Yelp and lived up to them. Exceeded them, even. Afterwards we got espressos and chocolate-covered madeleines at Mission coffee shop. Still sour, but only half as much as in Mountain View. Enough to give me some extra energy for the hour-long drive to Josh’s farm.

2 pm

10. We’re Farming and We Grow It

The farm turned was a 10-acre organic oasis sheltered from the surrounding open-field crop rotations by a wall of Eucalyptus trees. Their main crops are figs, rosemary, and green garlic. An entire section was just rosemary bushes growing wild. Josh got tons of info. I got some good fresh air time. We stopped for another espresso before heading back to the South Bay. 

7 pm 

11. I Dance the Line

A local Meet-Up teaches line dancing in the bar area / dance floor of the Mexico Lindo restaurant in the middle of San Jose. It’s called Mojo Monday. Everyone was excited to meet Josh. He had a blast and we stayed until the place was about to close down. 

TUESDAY

10 am

12. The Monarchs Will See You Now

Natural Bridges park in Santa Cruz is an over-wintering station for Monarch butterflies. We made the drive over the winding highway 17 and stopped at Emily’s bakery for a hot turkey and cheese croissant a cheese scone and some lattes. Fueled up, we headed to the monarch grove. At first we only saw a couple monarchs flying around and I thought the trip might have been a waste. Then we read the signs explaining that the clumps of dead leaves in the Eucalyptus trees were dormant monarchs. Sure enough, a Stellar’s jay showed up and munched on one, ripping off the poisonous wings first, and causing several of the monarchs to scatter. Visit after noon and they’ll be more active, having soaked up the sun’s rays.

A bus load of school kids showed up and we took that as our cue to move to the beach. We listened to the waves, watched the pelicans, and admired the rocky “bridge” formation. A while later the kids followed us, so we headed back to the car. We pulled around for a different view of the natural bridge, and then cruised the oceanside drive. The rocky banks leading to the beaches are covered with an “ice plant”. It’s a succulent that a native of South Africa. Introduced to keep the ground cover, now it’s considered a menace, like kudzu in the South.

Noon

13. Sweet French Cookies and Celebrity Mug Shots

We stopped at a charcuterie and - another - bakery, where I got macarons, which are soft french cookies that form a sandwich around a sweet creamy filling. Yum! Then we went to a burger shop called “Burger.” We sampled about 10 beers each before deciding on some juicy dark pints to go along with our burgers. When we placed our food order, we were given a mug shot of Matthew McConaughey. Classy!

1 pm

14. Cruisin’ the Pacific Coast

W drove highway 1 all the way to San Francisco. Locals call it PCH - Pacific Coast Highway. Josh was fascinated by the farms along the ocean. The ocean views didn’t disappoint either, despite the grey, cloudy winter weather. We stopped in Half Moon Bay for even less bitter espresso, then continued up to San Francisco.

2 pm

15. Foodies in the Mission District

We had been given a mission to accomplish in the Mission District. Reconnoiter the bakery called La Tartine. We arrived after a perilous parallel parking performance. Research photos were taken, and a massive Lemon Meringue cake was purchased for a party that evening. From there we walked to the Yelp-recommended chocolate shop called Dandelion. They specialize in single-source chocolate beans from tropical destinations like Madagascar and Belize and you can see the entire production area. It was like a Krispy Kreme for chocolate bars. Next door is another artisanal bakery called Craftsman and Wolves. I ordered one of everything. Then I canceled my order because my stomach wasn’t big enough, nor was my wallet.

THE DETAILS

I'm not going to spell it all out for you. You can use Google to find the addresses and websites on your own. I won’t baby you like the New York Times does

LODGING

Josh stayed with me in Mountain View. The fold-out couch is always at your disposal.

Food, Friends, and Murrrder!

How’s that for a title? Here’s how it went down. Thursday night I ate dinner with five church friends from Mountain View. One of them is moving back to the East Coast, and had a craving for Ethiopian food before he left. So we carpooled all the way down to San Jose, where we enjoyed a delicious Ethiopian meal, family-style. No utensils, just our hands.

The topic of mead came up over dinner. Mead is “wine” made from fermented honey. I mentioned the Rabbit’s Foot Meadery in Sunnyvale. So a few of us went there Friday afternoon. OK - I left work a little early; it was the beginning of a long weekend after all. I hadn’t been there in a month and I was missing my Death By Raspberry. That’s Raspberry cider + Raspberry mead + a dash of Raspberry Chocolate Love port.

Saturday I was double-booked for the evening. Mountain View friends invited me to a townhouse-warming event with do-it-yourself yakitori. I had no idea what yakitori was, but it sounded like food, probably Japanese, so I was in 100%. It looks like yakitori is Japanese for kebabs. I was excited about the scallops, intrigued by the chicken hearts, and easily sold on the spicy japanese sausage. On a stick. The scallops couldn't hang on the skewer, but they were delicious anyway. It was all really good.

Next up was Sunnyvale for build your own taco night. One of the guests that night was a very friendly pug named Frank. That’s right, just like in Men In Black. Except he was doing a great job keeping his cover; didn’t say a word. The hosts are heading off soon for a vacation to Italy - which makes me very envious.

So that’s the deal with friends and food. What else was there? Oh, yeah! Murrrder!

My Wednesday night church group put on a murder mystery night. It was a western theme, and the 20 of us had to act out parts and discover who committed the murder. (No guests were harmed in the making of this event.) I was given the role of a fine, upstanding US Marshal. As a bonus, I got to check the pulse of the victim, declare him dead, and then perform a few speaking parts related to the instructions, the evidence, and lastly the revelation of the murderer.  As a bonus, I actually guessed the culprit. I didn’t pick up on any of the clues; I just had a hunch about the guy. Isn’t that how it works in real life?

If all that wasn’t enough, I also went to Spanish conversation night on Tuesday, got my car washed for free and signed up for French wine tasting on the beach next Saturday. All in all, a really fun week. And it was just capped off by a rainbow! (Double rainbow!!)

Cherries, Jesus, and Paris!

Yay! It’s Cherry Season! My two favorite fruit seasons are Cherries/Blueberries in the summer and Pears in the winter. During the interminable dry spells between them, I’m forced to subsist on Fuji apples, grapes, and pluots (plum-apricot hybrids full of sweet juiciness). Oh, the humanity!

Car update: If you want a used car for less than 10 large out here, from a private owner, you better have an envelope of cash the day it goes up on Craigslist. No taking it to the mechanic. No paying by cashier’s check. I spent a week chasing cars to learn this. I would get a call back that day, but they’d be sold within 2 days. So I’m moving on to dealer used cars, in the next price range up. Then the next, then the next...

Divorce update: We both signed the settlement agreement. Now our file waits for a court clerk to check it and stamp it. I will be single on August 13. I wish there was a way I could stop the divorce. Even if I refuse to sign anything, it would continue on anyway. All it takes is one person’s determination. 

This isn’t how I wanted it to be. We both ruled out divorce as an option when we got married. We both fought through plenty of conflict and baggage. I will never truly know what changed in Marianne. Instead I will inevitably invent an explanation to simplify the story for myself and to answer the questions I will get about it.

Are Christians Anything Like Jesus? Gateway Church commissioned a study to gauge if Christians’ attitudes and actions were more like Jesus or more like the religious leaders of his day, the Pharisees, who opposed him. I won’t spoil the findings, but being a Christian doesn’t automatically turn you into a perfect person. And it’s still too easy to focus on other people’s weaknesses, rather than our own. And too easy to get caught up in rules rather being loving. Click to read the results or take the survey.

Other topics that caught my eye this week:

• How to be Decisive - might have helped me with my car search.
• Fluent in Context-ese - good reminder that you don’t have to understand all the words in a foreign language.
• Lessons from Traveling - some useful trips for my next trip...to Paris!

In less than a week I will be in Paris! With my Mom! Speaking French! Eating French food and drinking French wine! In cute outdoor cafes or in the park! Seeing French people and sights! Can’t wait! Au revoir!

Blueberries, Razors, Moving, and other Random Stuff

Blueberries are back! Yay! That makes me happy. Cherries will be here in a couple weeks, sending me to further fits of delight, followed by pluots (yummy, juicy, fruity pluots). Apples and mandarin oranges are gone, having kept me satisfied for the first 4 months of the year. I’m going to have to buy a pie dish so I can make a blueberry cream pie and eat the whole darn thing myself. Probably in one sitting.

We had a heat wave last weekend, meaning it got up to 88 degrees or so. There’s no AC in the house. It cools down overnight, or I’d be a puddle. I see a fan purchase in my future. Probably at 90 degrees.

I recently fell for an act of pure marketing genius. A product was reviewed on a money podcast I listen to. Now, a money podcast should make me more prudent about my spending. Oh, no. I paid $25 for a shaving set: razor, 3 blades, and shaving cream. The brand is Harry’s. You pay more for the razor, but less for the blades, because they cut out the middlemen. It’s not a good time to be a middleman. Only a front-man.

A few days later I tried the razor. (It wasn't delayed gratification; it's just that I only shave 3 times a week.) It was...amazing! It felt more like a face massage than a razor. The cartridge has 5 blades! (Take that, quattro!) It’s as big as those gummy hands we used to thwap each other with. And it’s flexible. So it exerts almost no pressure on your face. I was stunned. At the rate I shave, I’m probably set for the rest of the year.

The best part of my week was probably on Sunday morning. I got to help a friend from church move from Los Gatos to Campbell. You might think that moving is just exploiting free labor. (There were about 6 of us helping altogether.) But I really enjoyed being part of a fun team. (Extrovert!) And packing a U-Haul is like playing tetris to me, which is like catnip to a kitty. It was packed and unpacked in less than 2 hours and we were done by 10:30. Which gave me plenty of time to meet a friend - and her poodle puppy - for lunch.

Cocoa, the poodle puppy

Once again, I spent several hours each day looking at car postings on craigslist, trying to weed out the good from the rust-buckets. In the end, I gave up and joined a local credit union so that they can find me a car. I’m done.

I’ve been listening to recent sermons from Gateway Church in Austin about Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, and our tendency to try to fix other people. Or to change them. (How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but the lightbulb has to really want to change.) I'm trying to turn it around and think about what I need to change in me first.

Roses are growing like weeds all around: at work, in downtown, even along the walkway to my house. I stopped anyway to smell them. Ah.

Downtown Mountain View Rose-Weeds

Austin! Georgetown! Jacksonville! Cedar Park!

I just got back from my third trip to Austin this year. I’ve made one trip a month so far, and next month’s trip to Paris will make it five for five. Or cinq sur cinq. Airfare feels cheap compared to what I’m paying for rental cars. Sure, it was a fun-to-drive little red Kia Forte with a bluetooth phone connection and satellite radio, but it cost me twice what my airfare did. Of course, I don’t get bluetooth on the airplane, so maybe the higher price makes sense after all.

My new Austin destination is Bangers on Rainey street, with gourmet sausages and 100+ taps to choose from. I made it my first stop after picking up the rental car. A buddy met me there and I had a nice wheat beer with my venison sausage sandwich. Or maybe I had a nice venison sausage sandwich with my wheat beer. Maybe I did both.

It’s bluebonnet season in Texas, which is just too cool. Best flowers ever! (Although the blue fireworks flowers in California are a close second.) Definitely a true Texas experience; there are photos of me as a two year-old sitting in a field of these beauties. (Blue is my color, after all.)

The downside to the four-hour drive to the Chance Ranch in Jacksonville is that I don’t have the emotional constitution for being alone that long. Pitifulness warning: I got sad on the drive thinking about all the times Marianne and I made the trip (nearly a dozen times over 10 years). I hope I’m now inoculated against it for the next trip, but I’m sure there are more memory triggers around the corner waiting to pounce on me with gloominess. Yay.

My parents noticed I’ve been more into wine lately, so they scouted out the East Texas wineries. One of them had a nice little self-guided walk through the vineyard after the wine tasting. I liked their port (of course). The other one was...well...interesting. “Interesting” as in “I can’t stand your sense of decor, but it’s a free country and you certainly didn’t do it half-way.” They specialize in sweet wines and...junk. Er, formerly useful tools that are now strewn around in a manner intended to be decorative. It was East Texas shabby chic - minus the chic. 

Back in Austin I worked out of the local Cisco office (saving vacation days). I enjoyed going out for lunch with co-workers and friends. I saw two action movies at Alamo Drafthouse, where the beer makes bad movies worth it. (Delicious Pecan Porter). I had several relaxing dinners with the Cannons, along with an ice cream celebration for Devin’s grades. Devin and I even went to Outback Steakhouse so he could get his sirloin fix. (I prefer filet mignon) We followed that up with a visit to Main Event for air hockey, rock-wall climbing, glow-in-the-dark putt-putt golf and a virtual roller-coaster that brought me closer to puking than a real one ever has.

Now a highlight of some things I read or heard this week that might be educational or entertaining in some way. No promises. Well, I found them educational and entertaining.

• zenhabits: Work Mind and Vacation Mind, Simultaneously

• Fluent in Three Months: Fail Fast and Fail Often

• NPR: Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me

• Gateway Church: Refrigerator Rights - What’s That Smell?

• New York Times: New Culprit in Heart Disease

On Saturday Devin and I went to the Cedar Park Cave Day, where we found a really cool cave to climb down into - right behind a subdivision of houses. That evening we sent his parents off on a date. We ate at Kerbey Lane and then brought back Ben and Jerry’s ice cream to enjoy with our movie, Battle Los Angeles, which was quite good. Lesson: “Go left or go right. It doesn’t matter which, but make a decision.” (And - if aliens can land on earth, they probably brought aircraft, not just ground troops.)

On Sunday I went to Gateway Church. As part of their Refrigerator Rights series, they had an actual refrigerator on stage, of course. They talked about letting a few people into your life who can get to know the things about you that you usually hide because they stink. (The things, not the people.)  The pastor pulled a “prop” tupperware dish from the on-stage fridge. When he sniffed it - theatrically - he found that it contained some prop food that was actually stinky enough to get his attention. Good prank by his staff.

In the failure-to-communicate department, Derry proposed a hike along Bull Creek as our penultimate Austin activity. I heard hike as in “on a trail”. He meant hike as in “bushwhack our way along the bank of the creek, crossing it randomly, and scrambling up and down rocks and slopes as needed regardless of the terrain” He had hiking boots and cargo shorts. I had running shoes and old jeans. I came away with a few bruises, but avoided landing in the creek or contracting poison ivy. We had some good conversation, saw a few fish, and returned sweaty, Gatorade in hand.

And after a day of planes, trains, and automobiles, I’m back in Mountain View doing laundry and scoping out a restaurant for dinner. I’m thinking Ramen.

Mexico City in March

So, I love to travel. Especially to another country. This time is was Mexico. I think it's still a separate country - they stamped my passport. I was even fine traveling in coach, what with the crossword puzzle in the airline magazine, and a game and movie on the iPad. On the leg from DFW to Mexico City I caught up with 3 guys from work, all of whom were wearing blazers. Made me feel under-dressed in my casually untucked travel shirt. Oh well.

The first night was a bit rough as I had a little too much wine, which didn’t go well with the altitude (~7000 ft). Around 3:30 I hit a deep sleep, but the hotel alarm clock - set by a previous guest/sadist - jolted me up at 5:30. 

We had all-day meetings in a fancy hotel for 3 days, where they catered breakfast, a morning snack, lunch, and an afternoon snack. For dinner the first night we were treated to a cooking class in the hotel kitchen. 15 of us made shrimp ceviche and a beef loin "unrolled" and stuffed with mushrooms topped with poblano pepper garnish and a poblano pepper cream sauce. Yummy! The only weird part was that the mushrooms were a mexican variety that grows on corn.

I managed to get up for a workout on Wednesday, on the 15th floor of the hotel. The mountains were beautiful, when they weren’t hidden by clouds or smog. 

Besides cooking, the highlight of my trip may have been the search for post cards - just because I got to speak a lot of Spanish. I probably sounded like a 5-year-old, since I could only remember the present tense, and hardly ever got my verbs and nouns and adjectives to agree. (Argumentative lot they were.) I had a great conversation with a taxi driver about marriage, family life, the new pope, etc. Or at least I think I did.

It turns out there’s not a lot of demand for postcards in the business district where our hotel was located. So not a lot of supply either. I went to a department stored owned by the richest man in the world, Carlos Slim. They had 6 copies of a single version of a postcard of a soccer stadium. The 2nd taxi driver suggested I try Wal Mart. No luck there either.

On Thursday I took my 2 postcards of the stadium and called a taxi to take me to the post office. It turns out the demand for a post office matches that of post cards (not sure why those would be related). It was bad news when the driver looked at me and said he’d go back into the hotel to ask for directions. At least he came back. 10 minutes later, more directions. Then more directions. Back the same way we came. More directions. Some discussion about why nobody gives good directions and why the post office is hidden (I think that’s what we were talking about. Maybe it was the new pope instead.). I had a meeting to get back to soon, and I began to understand how contestants on the Amazing Race feel when their taxi gets lost and they don’t understand what’s going on. And then we found it. There was no line - I guess no one else could find it either. 15 minutes later I was back at the hotel for lunch.

The next day I took the hour-long cab ride to the airport - dodging upcoming demonstrations over labor contracts. I got in trouble at security. I couldn't leave my laptop in my special leave-your-laptop-in-the-backpack backpack. Out it came. So did the iPad. Then they gave me a massage. I think they called it a pat-down. Then they had me open up my backpack and rifled through the tangle of chargers and cords. The rubicks cube probably didn’t help matters. Then I was through, and with a quick stop for empanadas I made it to the gate and on the plane for more travel time with a new airline magazine, an iPad game, and “Wreck-It Ralph” (which I liked.) 

I can’t wait to travel again to a place that humors my language ability. (Like Paris. Or even East Texas.)