2003
A Strange but True Story from Our Everyday Life
Okay, it’s not really a story, and it may not be that strange, but it is true.
Yesterday we spent over $260 at Target. We did not buy any electronics or massive amounts of pharmaceuticals. If there were a game show that tested a couple’s ability to spend as much money as possible at Target, buying only stuff they actually need and use, we would surely win. That ceramic candle holder in the shape of a cat’s head was entirely necessary. The grand prize for the champion shoppers? Two weeks of free groceries from Safeway. With the $150 we’d save, we could buy enough cereal, Trader Joe’s salsa, and Pop Ice to last until Dylan gets his check and tuition waiver from the university (any day now, right?)
2003
Vacations for People Who Don’t Like Each Other All That Much
From this article about new ways to be a tourist:
‘Erotourism’
Henry said his most unusual invention was erotourism, where a couple heads to the same town but travels there separately. The challenge is to find one another abroad.
He and his wife of 30 years have engaged in the erotic pursuit in five cities and have managed to hook up every time.
“Each time we were convinced that this time, we wouldn’t find each other, and each time we did,” he said.
That’s messed up.
2003
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Below are two albums of photos from a weekend spent geocaching, Saturday over the East Bay Hills, where it was in the nineties, Sunday eighty miles up the coast in Tomales and Bodega, where it was overcast and in the fifties.
On the first day, we found two caches. The first–Paso Nogal Book Cache–was in a vast and hilly dog-friendly park with lots of bluebirds and a taunting view of the residential swimming pools below. We traded extra copies of Frankenstein and Return of the Native for
Photos of our day in Diablo Valley
The next day we set out after a cache named Abandoned Oyster Farm. It was even better than we hoped it would be. The pictures do it more justice than words. Then we went farther north to a cache called Do the Math. On a clear day you can see the ocean, but we were completely socked in by fog. I imagine the huge rocks in the mist were straight out of Lord of the Rings (I say “imagine” because I haven’t bothered to see the movie). There were a lot of little sex-and-drugs caves near the cache, so we weren’t surprised it had been plundered by someone who used the logbook to ask for donations. There were a lot of sheep herds in the area, each flock with its own white guard dog. The car was completely out of gas at this point, so when we finally reached Bodega Bay (where Hitchcock filmed The Birds), we were glad this “quaint” fishing village had become enough of a tourist trap to warrant a gas station, unlike the other five towns we rolled through on fuel fumes. The final two caches of the day–Hole in the Head and Rabbit Eye View were on Bodega Head, a rounded spit of land that was a proposed site of a nuclear reactor in the sixties and that probably has a splendid view of the ocean if not for the fog (see map on the cache pages). It was eerie walking around in the bushes, not being able to see 150 feet in any direction, but within that circle of visibility we saw several families of deer grazing and prancing, a massive squatty skunk waddling ten feet from Dylan, a fuzzy black caterpillar, and one tiny green inchworm. We could hear sea lions barking below on the coast. On the way out of Bodega Bay, our bodies were running only on fumes, but since it cost twenty dollars to get a basket of fish and chips anywhere in the vicinity, we instead stopped for a bag o’ taffy before heading inland to Bodega (also in The Birds). Again, we decided it best to eat with the locals, but since nothing was open in downtown Petaluma a nine on a Sunday night, we had to drive all the way to Novato to get some good eats at Wendy’s. (Ok, so it wasn’t good, but it was eats.) There’s more to the Wendy’s story than is appropriate for this forum, but let’s just say we won’t be going back…
