August? Really?
GBJazzMan| May 16, 2010 11:55 pmWow internets. I’m sorry. It’s been since August since I’ve posted. And things have happened to The Matt since then.
For example, I took a vacation in March.
First real vacation in like 4 or 5 years and I needed it, as my co-workers can attest. I went to San Fransisco with my Folks the first week of March. Now you’re saying, “A family vacation? Aren’t you in your late twenties?” I am but it was a lot of fun and it was a birthday present.
Allow me to explain. There’s a funk band I listen to called Galactic. They are really good. If you’re not listening to them, go and do so now. Well, my Dad is a fan also, and he and I wanted to go see them, but the closest they got to Michigan was either Chicago and Cleveland. Dad’s original idea was to take a red eye out to Vegas and see them perform at the Hard Rock. Then he read a week up on the tour schedule.
Galactic was playing on March 5th and 6th at the Fillmore in SF with Cyril Neville, Corey Henry of the Rebirth Brass Band and Big Freda. And a plan was formed.
We flew out on the 4th and came back the 9th. First time I had ever flown, and it wasn’t bad. The decent into SFO kinda sucks. I don’t think my ears have ever popped that much. SF is gorgeous, and if you’ve never been, I highly recommending going. There is so much to do and we only scratched the surface. On the first day we did a boat tour of the Bay, which was neat. I got a lot of cool photos of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz in the process. We also putzed around Fisherman’s Wharf. Parts of the wharf are pretty cool, but there are other parts that can best be described as “Mackinaw City on Steroids.” There was a snafu with our hotel so they put us at a sister hotel more inland. The SF City Hall is pretty impressive by the way. I got to spend some time my friend Cat, whom I haven’t saw in a couple of years. It was good times and I had missed her.
After settling in at our original hotel on Friday, we decided to explore North Beach and China Town. A word to the wise, we didn’t drive the entire time we were in SF. The parking is awful. If you’re visiting, get a Muni Pass at the Airport. You’ll thank me. We visited the City Lights book store. I got 4 books that I’ve just started to touch (stupid backlog of books to read). We saw Joe DiMaggio’s restaurant and Coit Tower. The view from Coit is impressive. North Beach has some of the best Italian food I’ve ever had. We also took the cable car up Hyde Street and did the touristy thing and hung out at Lombard Street. Pretty sweet.
Friday Night was the Galactic Concert. The Fillmore is very cool venue. The bar area has autographed photos of some of the legends of modern music, Hendrix, Miles Davis, Janice Joplin. Gave me goose bumps thinking about it. We got there early because Dad wanted a seat. Big Freda, the opening act was okay, I guess. Rap, for the most part, is not my thing. Galactic, however, was fucking amazing. If you like music, see these guys. I came really close to driving to Cleveland in April to see them again at the House of Blues. Cyril Neville is an amazing performer and doesn’t act at all like he’s in his 60s. Best part? Chali 2na of Jurassic 5 fame was also there. He said he had came to the concert as a fan because he hadn’t saw Galactic in a couple of years and they asked him if he’d like to perform and he said he would. Just an amazing concert all around. A couple of the guys from Galactic were playing a set afterwords at the Boom Boom Room, and I tried talking Dad into going but it was after midnight when the concert was over and I think the time change was catching up to both of us.
The fun came after the concert. We waited at a bus stop near the Fillmore for like 10 minutes, and no bus. So Dad decided to walk to Van Ness and catch a bus there. It’s about a mile from the Fillmore to Van Ness. And it’s mostly up hill. Climbing a 30% grade for over a half a mile sucks. Funny thing is, we never saw a bus our entire time on Geary and waited less than 5 minutes once we got to Van Ness. Why we didn’t flag a cab, I will never know. We passed the Chinese Consulate General, which was pretty neat.
Saturday was Dad’s birthday so we spent most of the day looking for someplace nice to eat for lunch. We also poked around the more touristy areas of the Wharf. We also went down the Embarcadario. We got up close to the Trans America Building which was neat. We ended up riding the cable cars all the way back to our hotel, which was a lot of fun.
I spent Saturday night with Cat again. The original plan was for her to take me to a restaurant south of the city for dinner, but they closed early. So instead we stopped at a gas station, got coffee and food, and drove down Highway 1 towards LA. Even at night, the Pacific is impressive. I grew up spending a lot of time on Lake Michigan, which is huge. But you always got a sense that there was something on the other side, off on the horizon. You don’t get that with the Pacific. It’s just endless water. We decided to cut inland on Highway 84, also called the La Honde. This is where I almost died.
All good vacations need an “And I almost died” bit to make it sound like it was more interesting that what it was. And I can say that this is the closest I’ve ever been to death. We’re going around a bend on the La Honde and the car hits a slick spot, and Cat starts loose control. She manages to get off onto the right shoulder of the road, pointed the wrong way. There was about 30 food drop to small river on the left side of the road. While we were inspecting the car, I noticed a rock the size of a basketball about ten feet of the car. Not only did Cat’s pretty impressive reaction skill keep us from falling off a cliff, but we also avoided a rock that would’ve destroyed her car. We got out of it with a blown tire and coffee spilled on my hoodie. All in all, I think we got out of it easy. I offered to put the spare on but she called a towing company she new in the area and it only took ‘em about 40 minutes to arrive. Not bad consider we were literally in the middle of BFE. Also, took 35 minutes before the first Good Samaritan stopped. A copy even passed us. Once the tire was changed we limped back to my Hotel in SF before Cat went back to her place in San Mateo.
After Saturday night’s excitement, I wanted a quiet Sunday. So I talked my folks into hitting a couple of museums. We went to the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art and the Cartoon Art Museum. SFMOMA was incredible. They were running a bunch of exhibits to honor their 75th anniversary and it was pretty awesome. This is also where I found Waldo. The Cartoon Art Museum was small, but I enjoyed it. I’m not a DC guy, but they had a number of inked Bristol boards from Frank Miller’s time on the Dark Knight, and it gave me goose bumps just looking at them. I’m an artist, as a lot of you know, and visiting those museums was really inspiring. It was at that point I wished I had a sketch book with me. After the museums, we took a long ass bus ride to the other side of San Fransisco, the Haight-Ashbury district. We stopped in a bunch of little shops, but our destination was by Golden Gate Park: Amoeba Records. Amoeba, for those who don’t know, is an indie music retail chain in California. They started in Berkley before moving to SF and LA. Think too Best Buy’s filled with nothing but music. I ended up getting a CD of Dream Theater covering Master of Puppets in its entirety. I wish I had had more money, because I would have walked out of there with a dozen CDs if I could have. There was stuff in there that I hadn’t saw before. It was refreshing going to an actual record shop, I wish Michigan had something like that.
Monday we started out with lunch at the Buena Vista cafe. The Buena Vista is the place that introduced the Irish Coffee to the United States. Let me tell you, that stuff will wake you up faster than the Redeyes we drink in Monitoring. Seriously good stuff. After lunch we did a bus tour of the Muir Woods and Sausalito. The Muir Woods was amazing. The redwoods were massive, and they were the small ones. Sausalito was a neat little town, kind of reminded me of Mackinac Island. We got back to the hotel in the evening and spent the last night in SF relaxing.
I wish we had had more time, and we almost did stay another day. Dad apparently booked the hotel for an extra night (and they were really cool about not charging us), and mom was this close to getting dad to call the airline to rebook our return flight. But in the end, we flew back from California’s mild weather to Michigan’s snow.
I had a blast and Dad is already planning a return trip, including a trip to Berkley and a Giants game at AT&T Park. Personally, I want to go back to Santa Rosa to the Schultz Museum. I’ve got over 500 pictures from the trip, and I’ll try to get some choice ones up on the internets soon. Also, I promise if I leave State again, I won’t wait two months to post.
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