Place to place

I'm sitting at my cousin JoAnn's house in Grass Valley, watching the sun come up. Well, not actually watching because that's bad for your eyes, but watching the light change and shift and gradually take over from the bluish glow that greeted me when I woke up.

I've thus far pretty successfully stayed on some semblance of east coast time, getting up around 6 and going to bed around 10. Hopefully I can adjust back pretty quickly when we return. I have a few days.

Yesterday we drove up into the hills to visit another one of my cousins, who lives up here in the Sierra foothills. It's really beautiful, and we spent part of the day just hanging out, then headed into two local towns.

For some reason, I had purposely not looked into these places at all. One can either say that I was allowing myself to experience them completely on my own terms, unfettered by others' opinions. Or you could say I was too lazy to do the research. Either way, even though I suspected that they might be old mining towns, since this is gold and silver mining countries, I was struck by how well preserved Nevada City was and what a wide variety of places you could buy really nice things that you don't need.

You've probably all been in these stores- accessories and home furnishings. The number of unusual cookbooks and bits of kitchenware and barware and decorative items, purportedly functional or not, available is pretty remarkable, as you can guess from my choosing to remark on it here. A lot of it was hippyish and new agey, but with nice clothes and lots of places to eat. All with what appears to be original buildings from back in the gold rush days.

We spent most of the afternoon there, then went to Grass Valley, which is not nearly as cute but is also stuffed with shops and restaurants. I was no chain places, including no chain hotels. Ronnie and I were wondering where all the visitors come from, because they are clearly tourist-oriented.

I can take a certain amount of the clothing/home furnishing shopping, but at this point I (and Celia) opted to check out the kitchen store across the street from the boutique. This was an unexpected and kind of mind boggling experience. Tess' Kitchen Shop is simply the best kitchen shop I've ever seen. Nothing else even comes close.

We stayed in there until it was closed, had dinner, came home and watched Guardians of the Galaxy and then had a nice long sleep.

Since then, I've been back to Sacramento and now on to San Francisco, where I now sit. A long, fun, disorienting day. Time for some good seafood and then home in the morning.

The Important thing

One of my favorite kid's books just popped into my head. It's The Important Book, by Margaret Wise Brown. The book is written from the perspective of a child, full of descriptions that begin and end with the statement "the most important thing about ______ is ______."  The narrator says that the most important thing about a daisy is that it is white. Other characteristics are mentioned, but the ultimate statement is repeated and definite. It's a brilliant way of starting an open-ended discussion with a child about the world.

Well for me, the most important thing about travel is that you are somewhere else. On Sunday morning at this time I am usually sitting in my den with my puppy, watching soccer. Today I'm not doing that at all. I am in a place called Rancho Cordova. And the most important thing about Rancho Cordova is that it is not a ranch. Unless of course the most important thing about a ranch is that it be filled with nothing but strip malls and chain hotels.

Okay, I'll drop that conceit for the moment, because it's not what I meant to write about. I'm here for the purpose of being here. That's different from the rest of my life, where I am where I am either because I own this house or have this job or something along those lines. Today I'm here intentionally, with intent, by choice.

This trip is a visit, rather than a vacation. A vacation is obviously about vacating something, about leaving, getting away and not being somewhere. A visit is about being somewhere, and in this case, being with someone. It's much more positive, don't you think? I'm here to visit my cousins and my 100 year-old uncle. Unlike other trips, where I fret about itinerary and time management, all I cared about here was getting here. Once in this place, where I've visited many times before, everything would work out.

My cousin and uncle live in the same house in suburban Sacramento that they've had since before I knew of their existence. She's a couple of years younger than me and we've been close since we were kids. We've spent time at their house (they have chickens),

gone out to walk around a cute little town, and talked and talked. I got to spend time with her kids and get a feel for what her life is. I did this with and without my wife and daughter who came along. It was a visit.

This turned out to be just the thing. I have been in a rut, as literally as one can be without finding a rut and getting in it. Since mid-November it's been head down and straight ahead in everything- midterms, new class, school administration, puppy care, Thanksgiving, one kid done with semester, one kid done with college and getting an apartment, school. Nonstop. Without even a moment to look up and see where it might end. It's an awful way to be and not at all what I try to do and to be. And I was feeling it would never end.

But it did end, and just the little break of getting here, hard as it was to arrange and execute, and visiting rather than vacating is restorative in a way I was not confident it would be. Part of that is just seeing my family and part of it is just the whack-upside-the-headness of doing something different.

And lame as it sounds, the most important thing about today is that I am someplace else.

Routine car rental, except for the car part. And everything else.

The whole scene was unlike anything I’ve ever encountered, though it’s completely plausible, so that makes it kind of unnerving.

We’d arrived in San Francisco on a nonstop flight from Philadelphia at around 1:30. This was all according to plan. San Francisco, like a number of airports, has a little train system that takes you from terminal to terminal and to parking and rental cars. It also meets up with BART, the mass transit system, so it’s all very handy. Unlike Miami’s execrable system, which requires you to walk the entire length of the airport in order to access the train, this one is just up a couple of escalators.

Its a pretty long ride to the rental car center, which in turn is almost shockingly poorly designed. Or maybe it was perfectly designed and somebody just misread the scale. “Oh, that was 1:100? I thought it was 1:10!” The train dumps you by this room that is about the length of the train and about the depth of it as well. This would work perfectly if there were nobody there when the train arrived, but that doesn’t seem likely, does it?

In this case, it drops us in a room 200- something feet wide, with about 20 feet between the entrance wall and the counters. When we arrived, it was completely filled with people. All of the companies had those awful but inevitable back and forth lines set up but with another line twice that length waiting outside the velvet ropes. Every car company had this.

I had Ronnie and Celia stand in line because although I thought I might have signed up as a so-called Fastbreak customer, which is Budget’s version of preferred service where everything is all ready for you when you arrive, I wasn’t 100% sure. That counter was on another floor. Another marvelous design element. There were not many people there, either on line or at the counter. I stood in line for a while. even though there was nobody in front of me, and by the time I got to the counter, I was starting to suspect that something was amiss. 

First, the the agent asked if I wanted a Mercedes. I said fine, as long as I didn’t have to pay extra. He responded, “How about a Mini Cooper?’ Much as I love the idea of a 150 mile freeway ride in a toy car, I said no. Finally, I asked what was going on and he replied that they pretty much had no cars. None of the people who were supposed to return cars had done so, so those people upstairs were all waiting for nothing. 

Finally, after quite a bit of scurrying around, they found something for us and pointed us out to the lot. We went outside and saw, well, a empty parking lot the size of an entire city block. There were literally no cars on the entire floor of the lot, except of course for a Mercedes and a Mini Cooper. They really had no cars. This is Budget and Avis combined, since they’re the same company. We walked to where the car was supposed to be parked, but nothing was there. Finally, someone drove up with our car, and off we went. The car was wet and had pretty clearly just been returned, washed, fueled, and sent back out.

We spent most of our drive to Sacramento wondering what was going to happen to all those people upstairs. There were at least 200 people on a line that wasn’t moving (I guess lines get long when none of the people at the counter can be served). I was still wondering this morning.