La Jolla is Too Much

    

View from Coastal Walk

    La Jolla has too much of everything. Too much beautiful coastline. Too much nice weather. Too much lush vegetation. Too much year round recreation: surfing, kayaking, canoeing, hang gliding, sailing, running, swimming, parasailing, scuba diving, snorkeling, paddle boarding, whale watching, fishing, and  tennis. Too much fresh fish, boutique shopping, sweeping vistas, stunning sunsets. 

Lush life in La Jolla

       What's not to like? I have enjoyed the too-muchness of La Jolla for many years because Darr's brother Frank and his wife Jane had an open door policy for friends and family since they moved there in the 1960’s. 

Windansea Beach

I even love the bag

    We have certain routines there, we have a favorite walk from Jane's house to Windansea Beach; we eat at Old Town Mexican Café; and shop at my favorite store Bazaar del Mundo. We always get a quick fix of Mexican food at Don Bravo, and stand in line for pastries at Wayfarer Bread, both in walking distance. 

With Jane and mounds of cormorant poop

    Jane and Darr and I went on the La Jolla Coastal Walk Trail and talked about eau de bird poop. The cormorants have done a number (number two) on the cliffs and the pungency has made outdoor dining challenging. We shopped at Sea Salt, a pretty boutique with a $5 million view of La Jolla shores. We had lunch outside at the divine La Valencia Hotel. 

La Valencia Hotel

The Del Mar Thoroughbred Club  

Del Mar Racetrack

    The Del Mar Thoroughbred Club and Racetrack was built in 1936 when horse racing was second only to major league baseball in sports popularity. We had Clubhouse box seats in shade and an attentive waitress. The people-watching was almost as good as what was happening on the track. Men wore blazers over polo shirts but it being California chose sneakers instead of penny loafers. Women wore long sleeveless frocks and some sported fascinators, oddly out of place in the California sun. A man alone at a table near ours had a bottle of white wine and two appetizers, and then, like magic, a big bottle of bourbon and a bouquet of roses appeared on his table. We guessed that he was a winning horse owner. 

Racetrack fans

     Jane taught me how to place bets, what to look for in the horses, how to play the odds. I played it safe and came out ahead by $15.  Jane had more fun with her bets, choosing horses for their names like Nasty Habit and I’m a Bad Boy despite their poor odds. I had a little excitement with one horse I picked to win, Sweet Azteca who came in second, but shot up to first place because the two horse ahead of him had defaulted. The winner had caused the other to trip, which sent the jockey flying onto the track (he was all right). 

My lucky loser Sweet Azteca

 Catalina Island 

Santa Catalina harbor and monster cruise ship

    The day can be nicely divided into 90 minute chunks. We drove an hour and a half to Newport Beach, took the 90-minute ferry to Catalina Island, waited in line 90 minutes to get a golf cart to go on a 90- minute tour of the island, and spent the final 90 minutes addressing my urgent hanger at Avalon Grille followed by ice cream at Scoops Catalina Creamery. Rinse and repeat the cycle for the trip home. 

     Tip number one: if you are going to Catalina Island from La Jolla, spend the night. Packing it all into a single day was quite frankly…too much. 

With Jane and Darr on Avalon Canyon Drive

    Aboard the Catalina Flyer, we were tormented by a huckster who would try to sell you your shoes if they weren’t on your feet. He delighted in telling us that a cruise ship with 5000 passengers had just docked in Catalina, so everything touristy fun thing, especially the golf cart rentals would be sold out. Except...for some of his company’s special offers. With a combination of hard sell and striking FOMO into the hearts of the trapped ferry passengers he sold every ticket he had for tours on a glass bottom boat, and a submarine that doesn't submerge.

    Jane, a veteran visitor to Catalina warned us off these offers and told us the golf cart was the best way to see the island and would be worth the wait. Thankfully Darr volunteered to drive this gassy contraption. I got a little scared when he said the brakes didn’t work very well. 

Our golf cart driver

     Tip number two—don’t go to Catalina Island when a cruise ship is in port. 

    I hadn’t done any research on Catalina Island, it existed only as a gauzy image—a getaway for wealthy Los Angelinos and Hollywood celebrities, yacht-y, exclusive. So when we came in sight of a gigantic rock formation with cliffs, canyons and caves, I was shocked. 

     Santa Catalina Island (they dropped poor Santa) is 75 square miles, 22 miles long and 8 miles wide, with only one square mile of commercial development, the pretty seaport of Avalon, packed with tourists. 

     Tip number three—don’t go to Catalina Island in the summer. 

     Then it occurred to me, what were we doing traveling in the peak of summer? We didn’t have school age kids, we didn’t have teaching jobs that required us to be back by Labor Day. Darr reminded me that it was because we needed to get away from stinking hot swampy Bethesda. Oh right. 

La Jolla lushness

    We had also planned to go sailing with our dear Tucson friends David and Kacey who have a boat in the Chula Vista Marina, but our fearless captain David got sick. They hoped it would it not be too much to ask us to come back again and do it another time. 

    No, it would not be too much at all.

La Jolla succulent

Seized by Assisi

   

Piazza del Comune, Minerva's Temple 

     On my first afternoon in Assisi I was sitting in Piazza del Comune getting my bearings, when my son Franky announced that the bread there is stale and unsalted. Oh no! I had read in a guidebook about the dreaded pane sciocco and hoped to avoid it. The reasoning for the poor seasoning dates to the Middle Ages when there was a flap about salt taxes. In protest, the Umbrian bakers made bread without salt. 

     Otherwise my trip to Assisi was perfect. 

Saint Francis

     Although travel writer Rick Steves says “Assisi is worth a day and a night," Franky spent two and a half weeks there, my son Peter and his fiancé Nila spent 10 days, and I spent a week. The three of them are students of hagiography and particularly interested in the life of Saint Francis. St. Francis has broad appeal to believers and nonbelievers. He renounced his family riches, and was known for his deep compassion, humility, and love of nature and animals. 

Franciscan Friars

    There are several sites in Assisi where one can retrace St. Francis's footsteps.  In a sort of Christianity Carousel, we visited them over and over. Not only were they the most interesting sites in Assisi, they were often the coolest. The heat wave was very much alive in land-locked Assisi, with daily highs of 97 and cloudless skies. 

The Basilica of St. Francis

    

    The Basilica of St. Francis is a gorgeous piece of Gothic architecture commissioned by Pope Innocent in the 13th century four years after Francis died. Much of the artwork is by Giotto, considered Europe's first modern painter.  The Tomb of St. Francis on the lower level of the basilica is a wholly serene spot.

   Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli

    Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli (St. Mary of the Angels). This beautiful church houses the tiny Porziuncola Chapel, where Francis founded the Franciscan order.  

Basilica di Santa Chiara 

    Basilica di Santa Chiara (St. Clare) Francis’ friend Clare also renounced her family wealth and became the mother superior of an order of nuns called the Poor Clares. 

 Santuario San Damiano

    Santuario San Damiano This served for many years as the convent for the Poor Clares and its garden is where Francis wrote the Canticle of the Creatures. 

Peter and Nila  Eremo delle Carceri 

Franky Eremo delle Carceri 

    Eremo delle Carceri (Hermitage) Before I arrived, Peter and Nila and Franky had hiked the steep three-miles to the hermitage at Mount Subasio, but during my visit we took taxis. Eremo delle Carceri felt like a beautiful national park with spirituality in the air. There are shaded walkways and trails and vivid vistas of the valley. 

Piazza di Santa Clara

Umbrian Valley 

    Just outside the Basilica de Santa Chiara is an elevated square with a grand view of the Umbrian valley with its neat farmland, olive groves, and cypress trees. Assisi is a beautifully maintained Medieval city.

Leaving the City Walls

     Hotel il Palazzo may have started as a palace, but it was missing a key regal touch, a coffee maker in the room. This was my penance. I had to wait until 7:30 for the breakfast room to open. Once when I woke up at 4:15 a.m. I found myself wandering the medieval streets in search of coffee to no avail, the espresso machines stood cold and closed. My hotel mercifully was air conditioned, a rare commodity in Assisi. Peter and Franky and Nila stayed in Monastero Santa Colette without air conditioning which was their penance. 

Basilica of St. Francis

    Mangia! My travel mates are vegetarians so I followed suit. Oddly I had no craving for porcetta sandwiches, wild boar, pigeon, or rabbit. This meant a limited choice for our lunchtime torta—mostly mozzarella cheese, tomatoes and argh, arugula. One day I thought I was getting spinach in my torta but it was argh, arugula. 

St. Francis and the wolf

    We had our best lunch at Chiosco Vamos in a shady grove preceded by a steep hill. When I asked for potato chips the owner made me French fries served with ketchup and mayo! This place is a gem, and hard to find on the internet.

Ristorante il Frantoio 

Sauteed zucchini, olive oil bechamel, mint pesto

Ristorante il Frantoio
 Juniper-infused, osmotized watermelon, almond cheese, gazpacho, etc

    Dinner offered more variety. My travelmates had been defaulting to quick dinners in the main piazza where an electric guitarist was nightly slaughtering “Halleluja.” We ate at several spots there including Ristorante Il Tempio di Minerva, Bar Trovellesi, and Keramos where Franky had "cannelloni,"served crunchy, fried, and delicious. I tried to upgrade our restaurant outings but that meant waiting until 7:30 or 8 p.m. to eat dinner which was hard for the jet-lagged, almost as hard as waiting until 7:30 a.m. for coffee…Our best dinner was at Ristorante il Frantoio which was a gourmet delight in an elegant setting with a panoramic terrace. It was at La Lanterna that I admitted I didn't like the pizza in Assisi and think that Cheeseboard in Berekeley does a much better job. But the pasta, oh my, is always perfect. I asked why I can't duplicate it at home and they said "different soil, different grain, different water and different sun."

    

Gelateria Leccapaletta

    On the question of dessert there was no controversy, we always went to Gelateria Leccapaletta. OMG they serve the very concentrate of your flavor selection. Coconut gelato tasted like it had just been scooped out of the coconut; chocolate was the essense of chocolate in its purest form: artificial flavoring was one million miles away. We got to the point where we didn’t ask if we were going, just when we were going. Sometimes we went before dinner. 

    The minute I left the sainted city of Assisi, my luck turned and I fell into the proverbial Devil’s Hole (a site at Eremo).  I had booked a first class train ticket expecting coffee service. There was none. When I arrived at Roma Termini after five hours without caffeine I stumbled into the station like a monster just woken from the dead. Praise god Italy is very accommodating to the caff-fiend.

Rome Marriott "Park" Hotel

     Then on the way to the airport United Airlines sent word that my 2:30 p.m. flight had been cancelled, followed quickly by “good news, your flight has been rebooked.” Rebooked that is for the next day, 18 hours after I arrived at the airport. United agents herded me and the 50 other “cancelled” passengers to a small area to wait two hours for an un-airconditioned bus to take us to Rome Marriott Park Hotel in the middle of nowhere. As we rushed the registration desk, the Marriott staff said they weren’t expecting us, so to sit back down until they found us rooms. I don't know why they call it a park hotel, the only plant I saw nearby was one belonging to Toyota. 

     Back in Washington as I was going through customs, I saw a woman wearing a T-shirt reading “No crying on the yacht.”  How far I had come from the world of asceticism.

Until next time

Beach Week in Rehoboth

Rehoboth beach

Despite the fact that I live about three hours from the Delaware beaches, I don't go there often. I like to go places that are much harder to get to and much less convenient, like Maine and Cape Cod. People tell me it's the same ocean, but I'm not so sure. 

But this summer I was awarded a week's stay in a condo in Rehoboth as part of a silent auction at a fundraiser for The Barker Adoption Foundation. 

Balcony time

The condo was a small studio with a queen-sized Murphy bed, so I invited my tiniest friend, Jane for the week of July 4 to July 11.  The location was primo—5th floor of the Edgewater House, a well-manicured and well-managed condominium building with a mix of knowledgeable full-time residents and a parade of baffled renters like us. Move-in day was challenging since everyone was dependent on one small elevator and we hadn't been tipped off to the location of the carts yet.  At one point during the arduous process Jane said “I can see why people stay in hotels.” 

We looked forward to watching the Rehoboth fireworks on July 5th from our balcony, as did hundreds of people on the beach facing south. But the wind had a different plan and all we could see was a huge plume of dark gray smoke rapidly headed in our direction. People were fleeing the beach as if there had been a shark sighting. Apologia from city officials.

The beach was crowded, and some people set up their territorial encampments at dawn, but I was always able to drag my chair to the “front row” and commune with my beloved ocean which offers certainty, infinity, spirituality, and comfort. 

Jane at the pool

Jane preferred the no-muss, no-fuss, no-sand pool. One day she had the brilliant idea of ordering lunch delivered poolside from Capriotti's Sandwich Shop. We split The Bobbie, a mix of turkey, cranberry sauce, and stuffing that put me right into a triptophan-induced slumber.

At the pool, before the Bobbie sandwich

When it rained we were obligated to go to the Tanger Outlets which started well with a good haul at the J. Crew Factory, but became frustrating as we learned that like a devil’s trident, there are three distant parts to Tanger,  Bayside, Surfside, and Seaside. After a while we realized that even the expensive shops like Vuori and Lululemon were using the outlets as dumping grounds for bad color lots, burnt orange, maroon, and forest green.

Jane was in the enviable position of trying to gain weight so I decided I would help her out. We sat at the bar for our first dinner at Ava’s at the Beach and were asked to move so a party of 6 could sit there. The bartender, Treasure, moved us to another section of the bar that she said was the best seat in the house. We glared at the party of six, judging their drink orders and trying to decide if they were from NJ or PA. We invited Treasure to share our fries and she did. 

Our friend Susan drove in from Wilmington one day and we had ice cream at the Ice Cream Store and then a disappointing dinner at the much touted DiFebo's. We had a very good sausage, mushroom, and onion pizza from Louie's Pizza,  great lobster rolls at Mason's, vinegary fries from Thrasher's, and we bought gift buckets of caramel corn from Fisher’s.  Our favorite coffee shop was Cafe A GoGo.

One night at The Blue Hen we had a crazy all-appetizer meal of biscuits, stracciatella dip, and crispy roman artichokes. Afterwards we stopped at Freddie's Beach Bar to hear some soulful but (mostly) bad karaoke performances. One performer sang Total Eclipse of the Heart, and the singer Bonnie Tyler died that night. I think it was a coincidence.

Salmon BLT

Jane took a barre class at Sea Barre Fitness and we continued on to Lewes, Delaware where we perused the shoppes, and had a great salmon BLT at Lewes Oyster House.

A week at the beach is inherently relaxing, but Jane and I took several days to fully unwind, create a nest, and establish routines in our 600-square-feet of shared space. I knew Jane had hit the sweet spot when she said,  “I don’t have to do anything!”

Sunrise

But a few days after that we had to do something. Pack and go home. As we drove back into muggy Washington, DC and unloaded the car, I immediately missed the gentle sea breezes and the soundtrack of crashing waves, and wanted to go back.

A rainbow on our last day

Blooming Berkeley

Succulents abound in Berkeley

   

    We went to Berkeley in May to attend Franky's graduate school graduation and, as a side note, to celebrate Darr's birthday which was the same weekend.  

   During the flight I realized I was reading the wrong book for book club. I was reading The Master by Colm Toibin (about Henry James) and I was supposed to be reading The Magician by Colm Toibin (about Thomas Mann). All you have to do in Berkeley is swing a cat to find a bookstore, and literally steps from the BART station I walked into Pegasus. and got the The Magician. I also went to the famous Moes Books, and I wanted to go to Sleepy Cat Bookstore, but true to the name, they weren't open when I went. I needed new reading glasses, and oddly I found that none of the bookstores, although catering to readers, sold readers.

    Don’t stay at The Graduate. We did, I made the rookie mistake of believing what I saw on Hotels.com. The lobby smells bad, the rooms are old and small with minimal amenities, the coffee “service” was an electric kettle and two small brown envelopes of instant. The housecleaning was inadequate, the staff ill equipped. Plus it was a mile uphill walk from the BART station. It redeemed itself slightly with the adjoining Henry’s Bar and Grill which had a good breakfast. I stayed there so that you don’t have to. 

The Graduate lobby, lined with National Geographics

     

The Sports Basement in the restored Berkeley Iceland

    Darr and I dashed into The Sports Basement in the morning, and then headed into the city lured by ads for the Monet and Venice exhibit at the DeYoung Museum. We did not realize that the destination was perhaps the farthest point from Berkeley. But we made it there with a combination of BART and buses and the kindness of strangers. 

Franky explaining ferns

 Wild mustard; hemlock behind Franky

With Nila, Tvisi, Peter, Franky and Darr post-nature walk

     Franky leads nature walks featuring edible plants on weekends, and we joined him in a group of twelve to forage the Fire Trails in Strawberry Canyon. Who knew there was so much toxic poison hemlock in the forest, and it's deceptively pretty.  No wonder Shakespeare writes hemlock into three of his tragedies.  You can pretty much grab a handful and go poison somebody. 

Pincushion Protea

        We learned about yarrow, wild mustard, dandelions, miners' grass, and thistles. Despite nibbling on many leaves, we were hungry after the nature walk and had to scarf down tacos and burritos at Cancun Sabor where someone else had done the foraging. 

Angel's Trumpet

    Berkeley is only about 10 square miles but has more than 300 restaurants featuring food from Taiwan to Tibet to Thailand. After we checked into the hotel we were airline-tired-hangry and stumbled into Mezzo, they make super-sized sandwiches on super fresh bread, served with the best minestrone soup I have ever eaten. We had great Thai at Racha Cafe; ramen at Ippudo; a French breakfast at La Note; Cheese Board pizza; coffee and pastries at Mey Cafe and Bakery; deep dish pizza at Zachary's Chicago Pizza, and yummy gnocci at Belotti Bottega.   It seemed sinful to have ice cream after any of these meals, but that didn't stop us, and we sinned at Lexie's Frozen Custard, and again at Miharu. Darr's birthday was that weekend and we celebrated at Gather, joined by our niece Stephanie and her sons, one of whom just graduated from San Diego State. 

    Nila works for the Mayor of Berkeley Adina Ishii whom I got to meet and then toured City Hall. My first job was in Tucson's City Hall, so it was fun to and see Nila in my old stomping grounds, local government. 

Nila and Franky

Graduation with Franky's mentor Brad, Franky, Darr, Peter, Nila

     Franky’s graduation was a joyous event, he was awarded his master's degree in education by Alder Graduate School of Education, at the Pioneer Amphitheater at Cal State East Bay. 

   

    I like Berkeley, the flats, the hills, the history, the hipness, the vegetation, the students, the weather, the bay, the bookstores, the food, and the coffee shops. Most of all I like seeing my loved ones, the great brother and sister teams of Peter and Franky, Nila, and Tvisi all growing and thriving like native succulents. 

Another weird succulent