SF twice in one weekend

For how much I usually avoid going into the "big city" of San Francisco, going twice in one weekend is quite an event for me. It started off Friday night with a birthday celebration for fellow mechanical engineering student James at an SF bar. Tucked behind a nondescript front, this bar had a great back patio packed with tons of picnic tables and people. The highlight of the bar though was the tamale lady who sold sketchy but delicious tamales out of her little ice chests.

I must have been feeling more confident after "braving" the city Friday night as I agreed to go into the city a second time on Saturday with Lindsey. Another friend from Mines, Sara, just moved to the area to attend pharmacy school at UCSF so we met up with her to do a bit of exploring in her new home. We had an "urban hiking" experience of sorts as we visited the farmer's market at the Ferry Building and then walked all the way up Market St. to City Hall to check out the Slow Food Nation Festival. Meant to encourage people to get their food more locally, the festival seemed more like a decadent/specialty farmer's market with a hippie-bent to me ... but it was still entertaining and had a lot of great samples.

After we were completely full of delicious peaches, plums, pluots, and hibiscus lavender lemonade we headed over to see Sara's new apartment. I had never really been into the more residential areas of SF before and I was pleasantly surprised at how much more relaxed and laid back it was than the crazy busy city I usually think of. It was amazing how many amazing restaurants were located within walking distance of her apartment too! I'm afraid I would want to eat out every night if I lived down there and had all of those options.

So after a weekend full of the "big city," San Francisco, I must say I was very pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed it and may even be willing to go more often in the future. However, I'm still not quite ready for the city-living experience and it felt great to get back to the little bubble of Stanford, pick some fruit from the garden, and open up the windows and not hear the city noise.

Stanford defeats the Beavers

You know that fall is right around the corner when football season swings into gear. Last night Stanford stepped out of its usual gloomy season outlook with a win! The whole game was pretty close but Stanford came out on top with a score of 36-28. Who knows ... maybe this could be their year (ya right).

The last couple of days my lab has been hosting an "OpenSIM Jamboree." OpenSIM is a free musculoskeletal modeling program that a group at Stanford has developed and our job was to teach a group of modelers from around the world how to use the program and delve into creating new features. Luckily ... as my brain was fried after a day of constant questions ... we took a break at 4:30, had some dinner and drinks and then headed over to the football game. Sitting around with a bunch of biomechanists at a football game I heard some rather interesting talk ... "so the quads co-activate when ..." "the strength of those muscles ..." Definitely a different experience!

I actually stayed for the whole football game as they promised a "Pyrotechnic Musical Spectacular" (aka fireworks) after the game. It wasn't quite as spectacular as I was hoping (nothing can beat the fireworks at the Colorado School of Mines) but it was still a good show and end to the evening.

Gold Country

For Dan's birthday this past weekend I surprised him with a weekend get-away to California Gold Country. About 2.5 hours west of us is the California "motherload" where millions of dollars in gold was mined from the hillsides and where many people insist millions more exist. I had done a little bit of digging around on-line and found a few possible sites for panning and so we set out early Saturday morning to find gold (or at least go exploring)!

We headed to Mokehulmne River just outside of the "town" of Electra, CA. The river was great ... awesome rocks along the shore, cool water to wade in, and even huge crawdads. So did we strike it rich in this pretty river .... nope, not even a speckle of gold. We found a few pieces of what might be copper and an old bullet but that was it.

After a picnic lunch we decided it was time to move onto different endeavors and we headed to the huge Ironstone Vineyard just a few miles away. With over 1000 acres it seemed this place had a little bit of everything including, most importantly, lots of wine tasting. We tried a bunch and mutually agreed that we still haven't quite found the allure of wine but it was a good place to relax after our busy morning.

For the night we stayed at a cute B&B in the town of Columbia, CA. This whole town was turned into a State Historic Park to reflect the days of the gold rush and is filled with cute shops, stagecoaches, and museums. Across from our B&B was an old school house that just happened to be having a "Back to School Night: 1861" event that evening. The whole event was adorable ... little kids dressed up in old-fashioned clothes, mock classes, and even homemade ice-cream!

Sunday was another full day of exploring the many small mining towns around the area. We visited Sonora, Jamestown, and Chinese Camp. We tried to find more water for a little bit more panning but being the dry season we were out of luck. Finally we decided to call it a day and head home.

As we were driving back through Palo Alto we stumbled upon the Palo Alto Fine Arts Festival. We stopped by for a quick walk through and gawked at what all the talented people can do. One of the coolest things was they had a whole street filled with chalk drawings. These pieces of art in the middle of the street looked like professional paintings ... I wish I could do that! Now that it is Monday and we're both back at work I can't help wishing we were still up in the hills exploring but we'll just have to start planning our next get-away.

Hydesville, CA

While I was lucky enough to be taking a final exam from 7-10pm last Friday night (isn't that ridiculous!) Dan picked up his two younger brothers from the airport and headed up north to see Tina (Dan's mom). They made it there safely by one o-clock in the morning and settled into Tina's "new" house. It is an absolutely adorable old pink cottage out in the country of Northern California complete with white gazebo and palm tree.

The dogs have a great yard to run around and tear up. There are tons of beautiful flowers and besides taking the dogs to the beach and gambling at the local casino, the boys did some great yard work to help clean the place up. The weekend ended with a berry-picking extravaganza where from the look of the scratches I think Dan dove head first into the thorny bushes. However, his effort was well rewarded with a delicious homemade blackberry crisp which I was lucky enough to get a piece of brought back to me (yes ... it actually survived the whole ride down to the bay area without being eaten!). All in all the boys had a great weekend and I can't wait to visit Tina's cute pink house in the near future.

Racquetball!

Dan and I finally played our first game of racquetball last night since we moved to California almost a year ago! Stanford finally finished building the courts so now we have four bright, shiny courts that are ready for me to scratch up.

Our racquetball wasn't quite as sad as we were expecting after not playing for over a year but we still definitely had more strikes than normal. Dan took an easy win in the first game but I rallied back to lead the second game 12 - 2 only to lose the game in the end 17-15 (I think he was messing with me). However, by this point I think I had him tired and was able to pull off a win in our third and final game.

We're looking forward to playing a lot more racquetball on these pretty new courts and hopefully finding some people to play with us. Yea for racquetball!

Wonderful Wunderlich

While Dan and his brothers were up visiting Tina for the weekend Lindsey Quinlisk and I went hiking at the nearby Wunderlich County Park. Besides the strange name the park itself was beautiful! Set up in the hills west of Palo Alto nearly the whole trail was shaded underneath huge redwood trees and willows. After a little bit of a climb you pop up on the top of the hills in a great meadow with views of the bay. On the way back down you pass by Salamander Flats - a random green-gooey filled cement pool that is supposedly a breeding ground and home to a large number of newts (Salamanders?) however we saw no sign of life.

After finishing the hike we had a quick lunch of peanut-butter and honey sandwiches until we were rudely interrupted by a stubborn yellow-jacket who wouldn't go away and decided that it was time to head back home.

Anyone in the bay area looking for a great day hike should go to Bay Area Hiker at http://bahiker.com/index.shtml . It has a great google-maps layout showing TONS of bay area hikes with great details and descriptions. Check it out!