Bay Area

Chieko has become a huge fan of Shohei Ohtani, a pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels. So we scheduled a trip to Oakland to see the Angels play the Oakland A's. Unfortunately, Ohtani suffered an injury last week and won't be pitching for the rest of this season. He's also a great batter and runner, but he isn't doing either at least until later in the season. Oh well, we headed to the Bay Area to see a game sans Ohtani and spend a few days vacationing anyway.

We started with lunch at Gombei, a genuine shokudo (Japanese diner) in San Jose's Japantown.

Japan Town also has Shuei-do Manju Shop, a place for sweetened bean paste in mochi (pounded rice). I can't explain. Sorry. 

After lunch we headed to the University of California Santa Cruz Arboretum. 

This garden features plants organized by country and includes South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. These are mostly desert-looking plants. 

There are several trees with pine cones, even though the trees don't look like any sort of conifer. 

Some of the flowers point up and some that look similar point down. 

I wish I'd written down the names of all these plants. 

More pine cones in a nonconifer tree.

Quite a few lizards are running around here. It seemed like when we got close they either faced away from us or closed their eyes rather than running away. 

I think these are called sun catchers, from New Zealand. 

We were surprised how tall these eucalyptus trees are. If you look closely, you can see Chieko standing at the bottom. 

The arboretum doesn't have a ton of flowers, but the ones they have here are interesting. 

Natural Bridge on the north end of Santa Cruz.

The sign says Three Natural Bridges, but there's only one here. Apparently the other two have washed away. 

For dinner, we went to Lillian's Restaurant in Santa Cruz. I had this salmon on asparagus and mashed potatoes. Chieko had homemade linguini with rock shrimp and lemon. We highly recommend this place. 

We then drove to Half Moon Bay and stopped at Pebble Beach (not the golf course) just north of Bean Hollow Beach to watch the sun set. 

In addition to a beach full of colorful pebbles, this place has some great rock formations. 

  

The next day we went to The House near Chinatown in San Francisco for lunch. 

Chieko and I both ate the Chilean sea bass, which was exquisite. 

This is Chinatown. I bought a new Seiko watch at a jewelry shop in Chinatown.

This is looking at the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco from a fishing pier at Fort Baker. 

Marin headlands. 

This was one of the windiest days we've ever experienced in San Francisco.

The Marin Headlands have several WWII-era gun batteries and turrets. When we were here two years ago, we walked out to this place at night. I had our only flashlight, so Chieko followed me, until we got to the edge of this former military platform, when she didn't follow me. I turned right to get to an area that didn't have such a drop-off. Chieko kept going straight off this ledge. Ouch. 

This rock formation is in the side of the hill at the Headlands. 

This wasn't only a windy day, it also had a marine layer that stuck around all day. 

This pelican is hunting for fish. Several other birds are floating in the water, and a bunch of seagulls are circling about. I wonder how the seagulls are eating, because they're just scavengers, not hunters. 

The pelican is going in for a catch. 

And he splashes down. 

Immediately, the seagulls attack the pelican, trying to steal his catch. As far as I could tell, the pelican won, as I think I saw him swallow the fish.

A coastal flower. 

Looking from the fishing pier at Fort Baker.

Fort Baker. 

Friday night was game night. I'm pretty sure you can't go to a baseball game without getting a hot dog. $9, plus $6 for the tater tots. $5 for a 20-oz bottle of water. $30 for parking. 

I wasn't hungry, but I also had to give $9 to the guy yelling, "Corndogs!!"

Popcorn (or Cracker Jacks) also makes a baseball game, but I didn't get these. I did get a picture of Mike Trout about to smack a ball for a base hit. If you look closely, you can see the ball just before he hits it. 

The full view from our seats. 

On Saturday, the Bay Area was pretty gray, so we headed to Monterey, stopping at a produce stand near Watsonville for some very fresh strawberries and a giant artichoke that we'll take home. Nothing tastes better than just-picked strawberries from Watsonville. 

Driving on Highway 1 to Monterey, we wondered if there was a way to get to the beach that runs on the other side of the large sand dunes paralleling the road. This area used to be Fort Ord. Sure enough, we got off the freeway and found one road that went past a long string of decrepit barracks and out to Fort Ord Dunes State Park, which has a path through the dunes to the beach. 

Because of the high winds, the waves were pretty big. 

That's Monterey and Pacific Grove on the peninsula in the distance. 

This is Chieko on the beach trying to hold her hat on her head. 

Me. 

Sand. 

A sandfall. I should have taken a video of this sand, which was streaming down the cliff like a waterfall cascading down slickrock after a thunder storm. 

The boats at Monterey Marina. 

Chieko on Fisherman's Wharf. 

We ate at Old Fisherman's Grotto, an excellent choice that we found on Yelp using Sara's system: Choose restaurants that have at least 4 stars from more than 1,000 reviews. Chieko had the seared ahi tuna. 

I had halibut cheeks with corn couscous and mixed greens. Oh, so good. 

A rocky beach on the Bay side of Pacific Grove. This is a protected beach (no wind) with nice sand and clear water. 

Our last day here. We came back to the Point Bonita Lighthouse, because we couldn't get past the steel door over the tunnel the other day. 

The side of the basalt mountain is covered in lichen. I think someday it will turn this rock to dirt. 

The tunnel through the basalt to the lighthouse. No one knows for sure, but historians think this tunnel was cut by Chinese workers from the gold rush. It was carved over eight days in the 1850s using picks and shovels. 

The trail to the lighthouse. 

This is the suspension bridge to the lighthouse. The bridge was built in 1955, after a landslide knocked out the original path. That bridge got rusted and was replaced with this wood bridge in 2012. 

The Point Bonita Lighthouse was originally built on a higher spot on the mountain in 1855 to warn the many ships coming for the gold rush, which kept crashing on this coast, but due to the typically low clouds over the San Francisco Bay, the light was not visible very often. So workers built this lighthouse around 1877 using the original Fresnel lens from the 1855 lighthouse. That lens is still in use today.

Chieko at the lighthouse. 

Because this place is so remote, the lighthouse keepers had to grow their own food nearby. One food they grew was cabbage, and it has gone wild, growing all over this mountain.

Sea kayakers paddled up to a small beach below us and ate their lunch. 

San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge as seen from the lighthouse path. 

We also visited Japantown in San Francisco, where we ate lunch, (no pictures of lunch). We then drove to the Municipal Rose Garden in San Jose. There's another rose garden nearby, but it looked pretty rough and not really cared for. This one is much nicer, even though we came a couple weeks too late to see the roses in their prime. 

Each rose has a name in this garden, but I didn't write them down. So these are just red roses. 

And yellow roses. 

And pink roses.