Napa 1 - Plan B

It starts with Dave at recorder camp in Carmel Valley, and a plan for me to fly to SFO on Friday and have a special brother-sister dinner with Ben that night, followed by Dave driving up and both of us spending Saturday night there. Unfortunately there was illness with fevers at Ben & Joan’s, so we quickly changed to plan B, which was very good in every way except missing out on SFO family.

Plan B: First, on Friday I got to sub Barre and Senior Fit at 1440 and I got to be home when Jen got back from her long trip to Kansas and have dinner with her, and then she was sweet enough to drive me to the airport Saturday morning for my flight to San Jose, which means we don’t have to go to the airport on our drive home.

Dave picked me up at the airport, only a day or two more than a year from when he picked Bubby and me up on our way to Tim and Alyssa’s wedding. We decided it would be fun to drive up to the Lick observatory and get some lunch on the way, which was a little more complicated than we thought. San Jose has an interesting food scene downtown but not so much between the airport and the suburbs. We ended up at Rosie’s fish house with a 4 page menu of fish dishes and a strong smell of fryer oil. The food was good – my seafood soup was well cooked and seasoned – but we’d both like to see what Robert Irvine would do.

Lick was great, especially once we figured out that gentle steady driving rather than “having fun with the curves” makes me not get carsick on the 10 miles of twisty roads. The google lady took us over Quimby road where we saw some sort of amazing church-like structure with colored onion domes which disappeared completely as we approached it. We had a good time walking around between the various domes and admiring the 3M telescope. There were no Wilmerdings.

We got down and decided not to take the back road Google took us on; CA 130 had just reopened and Google didn’t know about it yet. It’s just as twisty but wide enough for two cars, which made the driving much less nervous-making.

We got to our hotel – the Doubletree at the airport – and more fun began. Unbeknownst to us, PawCON 2023 was happening at our hotel, and it was like nothing we’d ever seen. If you’re not familiar with “Furries”, do some googling. We were just amazed at all the costumes we saw. The convention was very well attended so we had some trouble finding a parking space. Dave finally found the last one, so we took an Uber over to the pre-anniversary dinner.

We started with a tour of Tim and Alyssa’s cute house in a very nice neighborhood (Willow Glen), and then walked to dinner at Braise restaurant. They are lucky to live in easy walking distance to nice shops and restaurants. We had a great time with them and enjoyed getting caught up. I am ridiculously proud of remembering to get a picture of us. Tim drove us back to the hotel which had cleared out a lot (they were all at various parties) but he was able to see one furry.