Day 5 - San Francisco to Woodside

We woke up the next morning and Chuck went to pilfer his aunt's kitchen looking for coffee.  He finished off a bag of Peet's coffee to make a load of french press for us.  It was only later that we found out that that it was decaf.

I spent a good amount of time journaling, getting myself caught up with the trip so far.  After at least an hour's worth of typing, I was literally 3 letters away from being done when an error message popped up and informed me that the program was closing.  I was using an app on my tablet, and was painfully reminded that unlike MS Word, this program did not have an autosave function.  Everything that I'd typed was gone.  After a deep breath, I jotted down notes to come back to later so I could elaborate.  I made sure to save often.

We had plans to meet Mary Jane and Chris for lunch and the hour approached quickly.  We showered, did some laundry, and packed up.  Mary Jane's garage had a steep slope that we'd ridden down to enter it, and I wondered what the experience of getting the bikes back out of the garage would be like.

Packed in cozily with all sorts of other stuff...

...including this old beauty.

It turned out that getting the bikes out of the garage wasn't too difficult at all, but it would have been if there weren't two of us.  We loaded up the bikes and headed off to the other side of the city to meet up with Mary Jane and Chris.

As we were leaving, we realized that we were in walking distance of the disc golf course at Golden Gate Park.  Had we realized that earlier, we probably would have motivated earlier to get a morning round in.

We rode through downtown San Francisco to make it over to Cesar Chavez St., the industrial area of the waterfront.  It was a good ride through the city, I'd forgotten just how busy of a city it was, but still SF is beautiful city, lots of personality and vibrancy throughout.  It's definitely one of the best cities in the US, if not the world, in my opinion.

It was slow going through the city due to the traffic, and we theoretically could have lane split at the stoplights, but I don't think either of us wanted to bother, the streets being busy, narrow, and unfamiliar.  And of course, we weren't so narrow ourselves.  Eventually, we made it over to Cesar Chavez and found Veritable Vegetable, Mary Jane's business.

Mary Jane, it turns out, runs something of an organic produce empire.  Veritable Vegetable sources organic fruits and veggies from the west coast and southwest and distributes them to restaurants and markets.  It was a serious operation, comprising of several warehouses and operating something like 23 tractor trailers.  She'd been at the business for almost 40 years, and it was thriving.

We met her at the main warehouse and corporate office, and had us park up on one of the loading docks.  It was pretty cool, navigating a warehouse past boxes of vegetables and jockeying around pallet jacks.  I definitely felt like something of a VIP rolling through there.

We parked the bikes and changed out of our riding gear.  Mary Jane and Chris took us out to a nice restaurant nearby, which sourced all of its food locally.  Lending more support to my digestive tract, I ordered a mixed veggies salad.  It was delicious.

After lunch, Mary Jane and Chris took us around to other warehouses to show us more of the operation.  It was truly an impressive layout, and all due to Mary Jane's hard work over the years.  The company seemed like a great place to work too--one of the buildings we went to had the employee cafeteria (they got free lunch every day, if they desired), the employee gym, and even a nap room.  It makes me reconsider what being "treated well" by an employer really means.

It turned out that Chuck had another aunt working there for Mary Jane, and we said hi to her.  I stood by somewhat awkwardly, as I was the only person that wasn't part of the family.  I did end up getting a
Veritable Vegetable t-shirt though.

Mary Jane and Chris had a meeting they had to get to, so we said our goodbyes and I got in touch with Oceana and got directions to her house.  We took Hwy 280 to 92 to the famous Skyline Blvd.  And then from there, miles of twisty single lane roads that would eventually lead to Oceana's place.  It was a telling sign of affluence that all the roads were actually paved and in good condition.  Most other places in the country, we wouldn't expect to see pavement at all, or if we did, it'd be patchy and rough, like the Mattole Rd.

Nevertheless, we made it to Oceana's easily enough, parked our bikes and proceeded to relax.  I met Oceana ages ago when I lived in the Bay Area, and we've managed to stay in contact, albeit sporadically, over the years.  It was good to see her, as always and it was good to catch up.  Her house (designed by her parents) has always been inspirational to me.  If I were to find myself with significantly more money than I currently have, I would take a few cues from what they've built for themselves.

The great room with a very well equipped kitchen attached

The fire pit, where we would spend most of our time.  That's the ocean in the distance, just south of Half Moon Bay.

We mostly just hung out and had a lazy day.  For dinner, Oceana made soup with veggies from her garden, and it was great.  After dark, we built a fire in the firepit and hung out there for the rest of the evening.  It so happened that there was a meteor shower, so we stayed up late to watch that.  It was great to be able to see the stars, we don't get to see them too much in Seattle.  On the rare occasions that it's not cloudy at night, we have light pollution, not to mention plenty of tall trees that limit the view anyway.  The west coast usually gets socked in with the marine layer on a nightly basis, but Oceana's place was high enough that it wasn't affected, and we spent the night trying to identify constellations while waiting for meteors.  Not a bad way to spend an evening at all.