Family

This trip is about family and friends more than sightseeing, though in this blog I'm trying to focus on the travel and images to avoid boring those I can't visit this time around, and to respect the privacy of those I do.

This week may bore you a bit more because I'm not traveling. This is my second day at Alex and Sigrid's house in San Jose and I'm hoping to nest here for at least the next five days, maybe through next weekend if I can make myself useful enough. ;-) I hope for visits with friends in Boulder Creek, San Francisco, and Oakland and those may provide more photo ops and restaurant review opportunities, but the rest of my plans aren't very exciting except perhaps for me:

• Laundry, oh boy oh boy. My two weeks' travel clothes are in the washer and dryer right now. If you've ever lived out of a suitcase for a while you know how welcome that can be.
• Getting Penny the Prius her 40,000-mile well-baby visit to the local Toyota dealer. The "maint req'd" light came on partway up the coast from L.A. Tomorrow's service will get me home and maybe into the next trip in the spring.
• Resting, reading, writing, walking, and unwinding from the past two weeks' driving.

Yesterday I did my usual walk up the hill behind Alex and Sigrid's development. It was green, a pleasant surprise since this is my first visit in the wet season that substitutes for winter in these parts. I took pictures of flowering yellow poppies, lupine, and wild mustard, but I'll spare you those and show a general view down the hill, across the green hillside dotted with wildflowers to the roofs of Alex and Sigrid's neighborhood.

In the afternoon we went to work on the house they just bought in an older neighborhood in San Jose, one where you can actually walk to good shopping and dining. Fixing the house up will cost them a lot of time and money over the next three months or so, but when it's done it will be a great home. We got joyously dirty and sweaty pulling up floorboards in one room to be used to patch floors elsewhere in the house, and pulling weeds in preparation for next weekend's assault with a new power mower. The joys of home ownership; give me a city apartment anytime.

Lunch was comfort food at The Original Pancake House in San Jose, a favorite from earlier visits. Not actually the original; there's probably one near you. Dinner was at La Fondue in Saratoga, a favorite of theirs but a letdown this trip. It was very expensive, in part because they charge a hefty corkage fee (except Monday-Wednesday) if you bring your own wine; we had some very nice $12 glasses from their cellar instead. Our salads got mixed reviews, though I liked my spinach leaves covered with crumbled cheese with a tomato-based sweet & sour blue cheese dressing. Our first fondue was the four-cheese (mislabeled 3-cheese on the online PDF menu) in champagne, and we all voted it boring. We liked the second better, a cognac pesto fondue our waiter recommended. We were all too stuffed to end with a chocolate fondue.