Spring Break, chapter 1

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 My niece Katya was able to visit for her spring break, which coincided with our spring break -- ours is always planned to cover St. Patrick's Day, so it comes pretty early compared with everyone else's, and that was a nice coincidence that let us plan a few days in the Bay Area, "us" being my mom, Katya, my younger kid Sammy, and me.  One of my brothers lives in the Bay Area, but his kids were not on break and we wound up getting an Airbnb in West Oakland for a few days, closer to the things we wanted to do.  I thought I'd just write it up for posterity....

We picked up Katya and headed right for my brother's house, where we stayed the first night, visiting and being fed some fabulous curry that was almost all right out of the garden (including the chicken).  The next day was Sunday, and after church we stopped by the world's oldest working lightbulb, which lives in a fire station.   It's been on for a good 120 years.


Four cousins

See those hills in the background?  I don't think I've ever seen them green before.

Soggy spring -- this creek is usually dry or a bare trickle.

The lightbulb dates from 1901

We all drove up to Berkeley, to Tilden Park, which is a large wilderness/park area in the hills between Berkeley, Oakland, and Orinda.  It was cold and soggy, but so was everything else!  (California has been having a wildly wet, cold, and stormy spring, with more snow in the mountains than anybody has seen in 50 years.)  Berkeley and that area has this interesting smell that is a mix of pine and eucalyptus, because 100 years ago or so people planted a lot of eucalyptus everywhere, apparently in hopes of it being a fast-growing building material.  Instead it's mostly a massive fire hazard, but the result is that the parks all smell of pine and eucalyptus combined.  Anyway, we wanted to visit the carousel, which is extremely fancy, about a century old, and only open on weekends.  We all had a ride -- I got a zebra! -- and then went out to explore a little bit before sunset.  We just wandered around a nearby picnic spot and mostly looked for mushrooms, as my youngest niece is very into identifying (not eating) mushrooms.  It was excellent mushroom weather and we found several varieties.  






Extreme closeup of a raven

Then we headed down to the Laurence Hall of Science, which was closed, but always has a great view of the Bay, and we took lots of pictures of the kids posing and looking generally poetic/playful/scientific etc.  Once we got cold enough, it was time to split up -- my brother and his family went home, and we drove to our Airbnb house in Oakland.


A panorama!  That's a good 200+ degrees of scenery.

It was the top half of a refurbished duplex in a gentrifying area that must once have been mud flats, right by the port.  The neighborhood is called the Lower Bottoms and you can't get any further southwest in Oakland without landing in a shipping container.  A BART rail ran behind the houses across the street, but wasn't unpleasantly loud, and somehow we couldn't hear the freeway at all even though it was right there.  Those soundproofing walls must be well built.  Anyway, it was quite convenient, because we did have to do a lot of driving, and everything was pretty comfortable.  No complaints.

Tomorrow: Berkeley!  My favorite!

Comments

  1. LoryMarch 22, 2023 at 12:29 AM

    How fun, thanks for sharing with us. You must have gotten the snow we are missing this winter, because we hardly had any here in NW Switzerland. I look forward to visiting Berkeley with you (I've never been there, consciously anyway - I lived briefly as a child in SF but I don't remember it at all.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JeanMarch 23, 2023 at 12:43 PM

      You've had hardly any snow? Well we did in fact get it all. The drought is officially not happening this year. (CA has more drought years than not and it's been very bad.) I'm still writing up the Berkeley day, but I'm getting there!

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