Paul Goldberg Blog

Visiting not site seeing, sort of

I did it, I drove through San Francisco up 19th to the Golden Gate Bridge and over. We arrived in Marin RV park shortly after. Here I will give a brief review for any RVers who are interested. It is a nice if modest park. Adequate space for most any coach and plenty of room for 4 slideouts. FHU including cable which we have not hooked up. Location is wonderful. It is a 10 minute walk to the ferry to Downtown San Francisco, no need to drive and park. Less than 30 minutes to Berkeley in light weekend traffic and under an hour to Walnut Creek. Tourist attractions along the coast are not more than an hour away.

Having said all that we are delighted to be here. We have been very busy with people since we got here. First, on Thursday we had dinner with Marlene

Picture taken on GeeWhiz

at Il Fornaio. The food was fine, the service was a bit messed up. We had a lovely time with Marlene who we met over a year ago on an OAT tour. We do look forward to seeing her again as we transit these parts in the future. We may even take another tour together some day.

Friday night we headed off for Shabbat Services at Congregation Bnai Tikvah in Walnut Creek. This was very important to  us as our former Associate Rabbi, Rebecca Gutterman, is now the Senior Rabbi there and we had not seen her in the year since she left (and we left too). We had a delightful reunion over pot luck Shabbat Dinner in the social hall and we were there for a wonderful music service. then we had to move on, but not without having a picture taken:
Sorry about your head Michael

On or way to services we left very early and stopped by John Muir National Historic Site and spent over an hour touring the house where he penned most of his work and lived with his family while ranching and then exploring. 

Saturday found us waiting to greet Minda and Will at the coach with Leo, our youngest grand nephew, now 6 months old. They arrived as planned and Carol made lunch for us so we could get out for some hiking. Leo was a wonderful trooper and hardly showed any signs of stress from the long walk we took in Samuel Taylor State Park. Nothing in these parts is level and he climbed the hills with great verve prodding his dad to keep up the pace. Of course his position in a carrier on Dad’s chest did give him certain advantages. We returned to the coach where Carol conjured up a lovely dinner from veggies she had been hording and we all were very relaxed, Leo actually relaxed into nap land. 
Sunday morning we met at their home in Berkeley and eventually we walked to The Actual Cafe where some had breakfast and others had lunch. Leo was a sleepy observer to all this eating. His turn would come later.
Minda and Will guided us to two excellent markets were I was able to buy great grass fed beef and then we bought enough wonderful produce to keep us happy for at least a week.
We have two more days in the area and the sort of plan is to drive to Point Reyes by the coastal road, in the Jeep and to take the ferry into San Francisco for one day, we haven’t decided which day we will do which.