Browsing Archives for San Francisco

The Aggressively Friendly Nudist – The Explanation

August 8th, 2008

Okay, okay, okay I guess fuzzy pictures are not going to be enough.

To find “our nudist” we drove to a town south of San Francisco called Rockaway Beach where we received instructions from the visitor’s center that if we were willing to drive just six more miles further south we would encounter a very nice strip of white sand and a quiet beach.   I do not remember the name of the beach, but I do remember that you park in a lot on the east side of busy highway 101 and then you have to cross to the west side of highway 101 which is harrowing and scary and I was sure we were going to die.
But we did not die.  We made it to the other side only to discover the jagged edge of a perilous cliff which beckoned to my four sons like a candy machine with it’s glass busted out.  They immediately ran to the edge of the cliff and this caused their father – THEIR FATHER – who has never been known to have a visible reaction to anything in his life – to yell at them to get away from the edge of the cliff!
It is clear to me now that I should have taken this rare emotional response from my husband as a sign of stranger things to come.
We eventually found a hidden set of steep stairs that meandered down to the beach.  Funny – it was almost like someone was trying to keep this beach from being discovered.   
Hmmmmm.
When we got to the bottom of the stairs there were several people sprinkled around the beach They all appeared to have clothing on, but I couldn’t help but notice two largish tanned men off in the distance in what appeared to be very scanty beach wear… scanty and strange swimwear. From a distance it looked like their suits were just kind of “muted” and “natural” and “grey” and “fuzzy” but yes it appeared to be swimwear.
One of the largish tanned men in scanty swimwear walked our way and as he moved towards us I kept trying to figure out his swim suit which appeared to be a speedo as it was centered entirely on the tiny area surrounding his… well… his…. his…. apparatus.
But then I noticed that the speedo seemed to have moving parts… jiggling things… and a strange thingy in the center that was… 
That Was…
THAT WAS…
OH MY GEEEEAAAAAWWWD!!!!!
The country doctor and I rapidly moved our boys to the water and they dove in.  I spread our stuff out on the sand in an area that eventually proved to be WAAAAAAAY to close to the nudist.   As we settled in, I took in the lay of the land and it appeared that there were several nudists tucked around the bend in a cove that was partially shielded by boulders.  One largish tannish nudist was laying just on the other side (our side) of the boulders with his largish tannish backside pointed our direction, but he was quite a ways a way and not interested in having a conversation with us.
But his buddy “our nudist” was not content to lie in the sand displaying his largish tannish backside.  He felt it his duty to traipse all over the beach talking to all the sunbathers.  His primary subject was the tides.  I know this because I listened to him talk to the young couple next to us.  They were very polite to him and conversed with him and for about ten minutes they talked tides with him.  
Then he wandered over to us.  The boys were playing in the surf, but the CD and I were sitting on the sand watching our kids.
We heard him approach us and come to a stop behind us and then he started filling us in on the dangerous tides in the area. 
I can’t really explain it to you and maybe it was the wrong response, but neither one of us was really in the mood for a conversation with a nudist that day.  
So we just IGNORED HIM.
But he was not to be IGNORED and continued with his informational lecture on the tides.
We continued with our IGNORING OF HIM.
Finally he asked us if we spoke English.
The Country Doctor said no.
And the aggressively friendly nudist said “alright” in a very grouchy voice.
I am not a psychlogist or a PHD in human behavior but I am pretty sure than “our nudist” felt extremely limited by putting on his display for the other nudists.  It was simply not enough.  It did not satisfy.  He felt incomplete.  For really, what is the point of being a nudist if you are not constantly shocking someone.  
So he had moved his act over to the non-nudists and there he happily flaunted his brown body parts, talking tides to strangers, glorying in the discomfort he created, basking in the warm rays of shock, sunshine and disdain.  
Since the Country Doctor and I were not willing to participate in his little show by keeping our backs firmly to him while he tried to talk to us,  he finally moved along.  
And then when he was a long ways away…
I took his picture.
And I am pretty sure that the aggressively friendly nudist would have been thrilled by that.
Thus ends the aggressively friendly nude… I MEAN NUDIST chronicles on this here blog.
Rechelle
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The Aggressively Friendly Nudist

August 8th, 2008


You pack your bags and drive to the airport…


You fly halfway across the country…


You hike all over one of the great cities on the planet…

You marvel at the architecture…


The beauty of the old buildings…


Your jaw drops to the the ground at the grandeur of the redwood forests…


You partake of the cities bounty from Dim Sum in Chinatown to spaghetti in North Beach to a hearty breakfast at Home Plate in the Marina  District….


But all people really want to hear about….


Everywhere I go… 
Everyone I talk to….
They just want to know if I got a picture of the aggressively friendly nudist…
Are you kidding me?!?
What’s the point of having a blog if you don’t get a picture of the aggressively friendly nudist?!?

Our nudist is the one in the foreground.  
I have no idea if the nudist in the background was aggressive or friendly or not…
But secretly…
I like to think that San Francisco gave my family the most friendly and most aggressive nudist that they had.  
But maybe that is just me thinking a little more highly of myself than I ought.
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The Magic Japanese Tea of San Francisco

August 5th, 2008

Day Two San Francisco dawned bright, warm and sunny.  We had spent our first day walking from one end of the city to the other and then we hit the beach where were greeted by an aggressively friendly nudist.  
How could San Francisco possibly get better than that?  
So we opted to head to Berkeley on our second day.  After strolling around the beautiful campus for a while we moved on to Oakland for a friendly ball game between the Oakland Athletics and our own Kansas City Royals.

Oh Oakland…
Oh dear Oakland…
Oh my Oakland!!!


For in Oakland, my children were to receive an education in the art of cursing out a ball player unlike anything they had ever heard before.  Which is not to say that my children have never heard cursing before because well yeah – okay  - um maybe from a few movies and uh also maybe uh… maybe just a little… from their mom.  But only tiny little bits and only when it was completly necessary – like when a snake crawled out of the brick pile or when I have to deal with traffic or maybe… um maybe…  just when I am kind of TIRED AND SICK AND ACHY AND SHAKY AND AT MY WITS END AND SO DONE WITH EVERYTHING THAT I CAN ONLY COPE BY SAYING REALLY ROTTEN WORDS but that doesn’t happen very often.  

Well – it doesn’t happen every day…
Most of the time it doesn’t…
And when I do curse it is usually under my breath…
Usually…
Most of the time…
So Oakland was kind of a new experience for our whole family. 

The young men sitting behind us were our professors.  
Trust me, they were not even trying to curse under their breaths.
And strangely – the more they drank, the more they cursed.
Eventually, they got so riled up, that security knocked them out of the park.
But our family had found a different place to sit by then and guess what?  We managed to sit down right in front of a new group of young male professors who continued with our colorful language lessons.  
I was so glad we didn’t fall behind
I have never been so glad to see the Kansas City Royals win a baseball game in my life.
You go Royals!
Woo Hoo!
Love Them Royals!
We drove back to San Fran….cisco – and in the last few hours of daylight, we explored Golden Gate Park.


Which would become my favorite part of the city.

I guess maybe it reminded me a little of home.  But with better pastry…


I especially loved the Japanese Tea Garden where I received this fortune.

And immediately started making big plans…

To….

To…

Wait…

I don’t have a business!

But if I did, you better believe I would be expanding it.


One by one, my family disappeared into the small Japanese garden and I was left alone with my tea and a pigeon and this moment here… 

This little tiny respite… 
This little vacation inside a vacation…  
This was my favorite place in San Francisco.

Oh! – And the Japanese Garden itself is a masterpiece.
Plus…

They have amazingly therapeutic tea there!
 It somehow gives you new strength.  
It is almost like magic tea.  
For after I drank it, I was able to smile at my kids again.  
I need to get me some more of that tea.
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I… I… I (gulp) I Raised My Hand…

August 4th, 2008

On our last full day in San Fran….cisco… we drove out to Marin County.  Or primary destination was Muir Woods to see a forest of coastal redwoods and we were not disappointed.  Even though I now realize that the colossal redwood trees in Muir Woods are only tiny wobbly suckling infants compared to the trees in Humboldt Park and in a few other areas along the California coast, we were mightily impressed with the grandeur of these baby giants.   

Our boys were restless on the comfortable wide gravel path that the park is slowly changing to a wooden board walk to keep the visitors from constantly trampling the shallow roots of these ancient wonders.  As we discovered earlier on this vacation, our sons seem to settle down when they are pushing their bodies hard.  They love to run and to jump and to throttle each other mercilessly and this is much easier to do away from the throngs of people on the main path.  So we took our family off road and they all dug into the calf crushing climb to the top of the park as they got down to the serious business of bloody boyhood.

And yes, even though they are much calmer when they are in full exertion, I still had a hard time suppressing thoughts of just wandering back to the car and leaving them all there… in the backwoods… of California.  But I controlled that impulse.. barely… even though ultimately I think it might have been the best decision I could have ever made for everyone in my family.  Seriously! I am not even kidding. 
 

The Country Doctor is very fond of relating the time honored tale of eleven year old William Clark ( of Lewis and Clark) hiking to his grandmother’s every summer ALONE across 300 miles of the Appalachian Mountains. Imagine the educational opportunities that would abound for our kids if we did abandon them in the wilderness!   They would learn to survive…  and to make things… and to forage… and to subsist… and maybe even to work together!   In the end, don’t you think it is possible we would be doing them a huge favor?
What?
Huh?
Oh!
Yes – the blog.  Okay back from my private little fantasy of wood worn children that do not suffer the taint of modern American boyhood.
Muir woods is awesome and also where I bought the book that is in the giveaway that is going on one post down.  
Right before we set off on our hike, we listened to a lecture in the park given by a passionate gentlemen who talked about the forest as if it were a sentient being and spoke of the connectedness of all things natural and how we are rapidly destroying the balance.  He was a very good speaker and he got choked up a few times as he spoke about his love of the woods and how they are going to disappear if things don’t change.  At the end of his talk he said there was a way to stop it.  A way to stop the destruction of the natural beauty of this planet.  He said that we could stop it.  Then he asked if there was anyone in the small group of listeners who would be willing to consume ten percent less than they are presently consuming.  Just ten percent.  Who would be willing?
I kept my hand firmly to my side.
He asked again – who would be willing to just buy ten percent less.  If we all bought just a little less, the companies would eventually make less stuff and fewer resources would get used up and less pollution would occur and the entire planet would rejoice.

I looked up at the huge old trees.  I looked at my young sons.  I thought about this old world and all it has seen and all it has weathered.  I wondered how much more it could take.  I wondered how much impact man really has.  I mean man wasn’t around to cause the first ice age or the um… other um… natural catastrophic things that have taken place on this planet thousands of years ago.   Honestly in the scope of all time and space is the work of man really so impressive to actually destroy an entire planet?  

But then I thought about how much we have destroyed already just in the past hundred years. How we managed to destroy almost all the coastal redwoods in the entire world except for a few that were just too dang hard to get to.  But guess what?  They aren’t that hard to get to anymore.  We have machines that can bust through anything.  Technology has made it possible to get to parts of nature that were previously safely out of reach.
I breathed in the spicy scent of the bay laurel and the fragrant humidity of the coastal redwoods that used to cover the entire world and now are only a tiny rag tag army of mighty towers pointing to heaven and creating an entire world in their upper branches that is only beginning to be understood.  
And I raised my hand.
I r

aised my hand.

I said I would consume ten percent less.
And I am going to try and keep my word.
It is a small thing for such an ancient glory. 
For something that has survived for 2000 years and maybe as long as 4000 years.  I can do with a little less.  
For the sake of this old world… I can.
I think I can…
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What Alcatraz Needs is a Puppet Show

August 1st, 2008


Bring it on San Francisco.

Bring it on!
I can take it.
I CAN TAKE IT!!!
How about another day of being beaten to death by the wind, on a boat to Alcatraz.
How about another day of walking all over this city and then forgetting where you parked your car.  And then spending another hour finding it.  But only after you spend $100.00 on a spaghetti dinner for the family… and not even an amazing spaghetti dinner… but just a regular old spaghetti dinner.
How about another aggressively friendly nudist?
How about two more nights cooped up in one hotel room with my entire family.
How about seventy three more trips in an elevator with my four sons.
All I really want to know is how many more years until my four sons can ride an elevator without having  to get into an All Star Wresting Match?  
And when do they learn to stand in line without poking each other’s eyes out?
Here are some things I have learned about my family and vacations on this trip.
 1.  Beaches are great.
2.  Parks are great.
3.  They can tolerate long walks… barely… but are completely unable to walk without smashing each other in the stomach several times.  
5.  Why is this?
6.  Why the smashing in the stomach?
7.  WHY!!!
8.  WHY DEAR GOD WHY!!!!
9.  Pretty much everything other than parks, beaches and stomach smashing walks are going to be a challenge.
10. But I am up for a challenge.
11. You ain’t got me beat yet San Francisco.
12. I am not down yet.
13. I may look like I am down, but I am not.
14. Okay, I am kind of down, 
15. Okay I am pretty much dead.
16. But give me eight hours of sleep and I will be ready again.  
17. I hope…
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San Francisco Day 2 (Kids Fail to Understand City Appeal, Demand Beach)

July 31st, 2008

Hee Hoo Haw Hee Hoo Haw Hu Hu Ho Ho Hee Hee Haw Haw Hee Hu Haw!
Guess the person who wrote this fortune never vacationed with the  Country Doctor and his four sons!  
But oh how I wish it were true.  
Oh!  Oh Please!  

We traipsed all over the entire city, starting at Telegraph Hill.

Breakfasting at North Beach.  

Yes, my kids had coke for breakfast.  
Yes, that’s right Coke!
And I had a huge bowl of coffee.  
Yes, that’s right a bowl of coffee.  
A bowl.  
I feel so… so… spongy now.

Bananas in Chinatown.  

Ferry Building – I bet no one has ever taken this angle before!

Cable car ride.  I really really want to call the cable cars – trolley cars, because my idea of a cable car is one of those things in the mountains that takes you up to the top.  But in San Francisco – everything is a little different.  
They put coffee in BOWLS for crying out loud!

Dim Sum in Chinatown.  
This is the scene of my relaxing fortune.

This is also where our children started dripping with emotion and consternation and fits of frothy fervor and where they started asking when we were going to a water park or an amusement park or a beach.  And we told them that beaches in San Francisco were cold and terrible and they said IMPOSSIBLE TAKE US TO A BEACH NOW!!!  
So we decided that the only thing to do was to let them find out how miserable beaches in San Francisco were for themselves.

Here are my miserable children.

Miserable and cold and wretched.

Miserable, cold, wretched, and shivering…

I think they have learned a lesson!

While my kids played in the freezing surf for TWO hours…
I laid on the sand and relaxed.
That is I tried to relax… whenever I wasn’t guarding my kids from the aggressively friendly nudist that wanted to tell us all about the rip tides. 
Other than that, it was very relaxing… 

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San Francisco Day 1 (Cold Grips Hearty Midwesterners by Throat)

July 29th, 2008

Before we left the house, Drew wanted to make sure the house sitter (my mom) had ample instructions.

We lunched on April’s Veranda en route to the airport.

Who are these boys watching the airplanes take off and land???  Are these my boys?  My boys that think they are soooooo big?  My boys who think they are so grown up and know everything already?  
  

This was Jack’s first flight.  I let his big brother Drew do all the explaining.  

Like how you are supposed to grip your ears throughout the entire flight…

Or at least until the snacks arrived…

Here is  CDW travel tip #1.  When flying Southwest Airlines AKA The Gypsy Wagon of the Skies, you must always request a whole can of whatever beverage you order.  Go ahead.  Just ask for the full can.  Then you will not have to try and subsist on a meager half can for the entire flight. 
I learned this tip from my mom.  
Thanks mom.  
And please hug the cats for Drew.
Oh and trust me – my family is a big part of the gypsy problem.  We did not bring a crate of live chickens on board, but one of my sons contributed greatly to the stench by farting until his insides were on the outside.   Which brings me to CDW travel tip #2 – Do not feed your sons baked beans the day before a flight.   

CDW Travel Tip #3.  If the internet tells you on your blog to bring warm clothes.  Do not scoff.  They are right.  San Francisco is perhaps the coldest place on earth.  And also very bleak.  Cold and bleak, this is San Francisco.  If you are a hearty Midwesterner, you may find this idea hard to wrap your mind around.   It was hard for me.  How can California be cold and bleak? How is that possible?  But it is.  So bring your long underwear.  

CDW Travel Tip #4 –  Get the tourist traps out of the way first.  

We continued our battle against the cold by switching to jeans.  Then we huddled together and tried to create friction to keep warm.  It is not very hard to create friction in our family.

You will buy hot fried food in an attempt to keep warm….

Your youngest, wisest son will choose a corn dog…..

Then you will purchase hot beverages to try and keep warm.  Your youngest son will drop his hot beverage in a store forcing your entire family to have to slink out of the store unnoticed… which yes, brings us to CDW Travel Trip #5 - Practice your slinking skills before traveling with children.  

CDW Trave Tip #6 - Beware the clowns at Fisherman’s Wharf.  
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