I woke up the next morning at the Laurel Inn. This small hotel is located on the corner of Presidio and California. We stayed here last year. It works well for us: the hotel has parking, is reasonably priced, and it takes dogs. Our room this year was on the second floor, so the view was not quite as good as we had last year from the fourth floor. Still, otherwise the room was identical.
I decided that Edie and I should have a good long walk while John slept. Part of this was also the desire, I have to admit, to work off a few of the calories that I had absorbed the previous day at two big restaurant meals. We set off towards the Presidio, following the same path that Spanish soldiers used in the eighteenth century to walk between the fort and the mission. In no time at all we were at the main part of the old army base. I was not sure where to go now, and the Bridge on this clear day seemed so tantalizingly close. So I figured, why not walk to Marin?
It proved to be a longer hike than I planned on. By the time we finished, walking across the Bridge and back, and returning home through Crissy Field and the Lyons Street stairs, we had walked for a little over three hours without stopping. We must have done at least ten miles. Surprisingly, although I was hot and my feet hurt a bit from my sandals -- not a great choice for a walk this long -- I really was not tired.
I washed up and ate some breakfast from the pastries and juices provided in the lobby, and John and I discussed our options for the day. We knew we were going to have dinner that evening in Oakland with Naida and the rest of the group, but otherwise the day was open. John wanted to go to see Jersey Boys. It did not particularly interest me, but I figured that there would probably be no tickets available for the matinee and so I did not protest when he said he wanted to stop by the box office to check.
It turned out that the box office was not open yet, but he did managed to get full-price tickets from the booth on Union Square. We walked around downtown for a bit looking at this and that. We stopped by the California Historical Society bookstore, and I checked to see if they had any primary source materials suitable for fourth grade students. I was surprised that they did not. Maybe this is a book for me to write and publish.... We tried to look around the now-completed Yerba Buena project, but this proved to be surprisingly hostile territory for dogs. It's not that interesting anyhow, and rather disappointing since it took nearly 30 years to bring this project to completion.
Jersey Boys was better than I expected. It is tightly written and produced, and the it keeps moving quickly through its VH 1 story. I never listened to the Four Seasons as a child, and I am not an Italian from New Jersey, so it did not have much emotional resonance for me. The whole thing is quite reminiscent of Dream Girls, but that musical broke new group twenty some years ago in staging and other areas. This was sort of like Dream Girls with red sauce. We were surprised to find Mayra Gassman sitting in the row behind us. We drove her to her hotel, a bleak looking place in the Chinese section of North Beach which made us glad to be staying at the Laurel Inn.
It took us forever to get to Oakland. I think were were stuck for just about twenty minutes on one block near First Street. Once we got on the Bridge the traffic was not so bad, and the GPS did a good job of getting us to the restaurant. Neither Bob nor Raul came, but I finally had a chance to meet Ginger, one of those people whose name I had heard for years and years. The food at the Tropix restaurant was pretty good. I had some goat stew. The corn bread was really the best part!
