I love Scotland, mainly for its landscape. I like walking, and it’s a great place to go hiking. ~ Toby Stephens
Happiness in the Highlands
So now that my life seems to almost certainly spinning into plan b, my sights are fixed on Scotland. I’ve got the time off at work, I have plenty of vacation time, but now I need to make up my mind what I want to do. I’ve hiked in Scotland twice on the Great Glen and the West Highland Way. Both are beautiful hikes. The Great Glen is a more beautiful walk along the New Caledonia Canal including some time along Loch Ness. For the majority of the hike you are up on the mountains looking down over the canal. Hiking in Europe is different than hiking in the US, these are hikes are typically done hut to hut, or in this case B&B to B&B. On the glen, the places you stay have a tendency to be several miles off of the trail. This means extra miles every day and some days, meaning to contact the place for a ride or finding a local taxi. I’m sure it’s easier now with smart phones, my hikes were pre smart phones and at times rides were pay phone dependent. This was the only part of the glen that I didn’t really enjoy.
The West Highland Way was much more accessible, the walks typically ended within a mile or two of the towns or even in the town you were sleeping at for the night. And the high was lovely, just not as pretty as the glen. So I’ve been thinking that I’d really like to check out the Isle of Skye or some other region in the north. So I’ve been playing around with Skye hikes and tours so we’ll see what I end up doing, if that doesn’t work my fall back will be a repeat of the West Highland Way. Below a few photos and links to my posts about the Great Glen and West Highland Ways.
Highland CowsDrumnadrochit, home of 2 Loch Ness Monster MuseumsFlotilla with Viking boat trailing
I will not play tug o’ war. I’d rather play hug o’ war. Where everyone hugs instead of tugs, Where everyone giggles and rolls on the rug, Where everyone kisses, and everyone grins, and everyone cuddles, and everyone wins. ~ Shel Silverstein
Happy Cool Down!
In the San Francisco Bay area we rarely get really hot, at least not on the coast. So in the city and along the coast when it gets around eighty degrees we kind of suffer. Part of it is not being used to it, part of it is the fact that very few of us have air conditioning. So for my Friday off I was looking for something to do the night before and had kind of settled on something I wasn’t really excited about. Then I saw a post on social media, someone asking for SF vacation recommendations, things to do. Someone mentioned taking the ferry to Sausalito and I had it. So I decided to take the lunchtime ferry from San Francisco to Sausalito. The idea of both having a half hour boat ride out on the bay, and a couple of hours walking along the ocean in Sausalito seemed like a great way to beat the heat.
So I started out by taking BART over to the Embarcadero and visiting one of my favorite sculptures on the way to the Ferry Building to catch the ferry.
The ride across the bay to Sausalito turned out to be gloriously foggy and cold and was a lovely ride over. Had a lovely chat with some tourists who were interested in the biology of the bay and were taking a not so direct route to Muir Woods. Upon arriving in Sausalito I met the Pirate Reverend, Pete Romanowski. He claims to have been on a house boat in Sausalito since 1964, and to hanging out on this bench for the last 18 years. He also claimed that the houseboat spot he had was where Otis Reading wrote Dock of the Bay. Now a Sausalito houseboat was where he penned the first verse of the song, so who knows. Well Reverend Pete was busking/hustling on the waterfront, and he seemed like an interesting guy, so I sat down for a rev to rev chat. He was entertaining as hell and we had a nice fifteen minute chat, then I dropped a five in his guitar case and said goodbye, he said, see you on the way back out.
Sausalito is lovely little seaside town. There are a lot of art galleries and shops and even a little seaside museum. It’s why I used the Shel Silverstein quote, turns out he lived in Sausalito during some of his most productive years. It was a nice mellow time walking around the town. I decided to get lunch at the Napa Valley Burger Bar and then a little apple strudel at a cafe for desert, both were excellent. However, I have to say the Napa Valley Burger Bar makes one hell of a burger, I had their bacon burger and it was fabulous.
There were some interesting little bits of town, a front yard with a really fabulous decoration. A nice little sea lion sculpture on the beach and an interesting mailbox sculpture.
There also was of course, as expected, lots of great little parks and flowers over town, and we all know I like a good flower shot.
Made my way back across the bay and the fog had significantly pushed out so got some great views of the Bay Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge, boats on the bay, Alcatraz and the city from the water.
It was a great decision and a lovely day, glad I made the decision to flee the heat for the afternoon.
I grew up in San Francisco. And so I’m informed in a certain kind of way about, you know, believing in democracy and believing in America. And I’m a very ardent patriot. ~ George Lucas
A Happy Sunny Summer Day in San Francisco
I’m fortunate enough in my job to be able to work a four, ten hour a day schedule in the summer. So this means I get eight free Fridays every summer. I consider these Fridays to be very precious and try really hard not to squander them by simply sleeping in and taking it easy. So while in fact I did waste the first one last week in exactly that manner, I was determined not to do that this week and made plan to visit a museum I have not been to in San Francisco, the De Young.
In planning my day I realized that the De Young is currently hosting an exhibit, Monet in Venice, and I’ve never seen a complete Monet exhibit so I was excited to visit. I was excited for the De Young in general, I’ve walked it’s grounds several time but had never visited the museum. It’s not a huge museum but it has really interesting architecture and I really love the layout. The grounds are wonderful and I dig their sculpture garden out behind their cafe. Probably my favorite room was the Oceania room, the sculptures in particular were really fascinating. There were some interesting pieces throughout the museum including a number of really interesting Chihuly pieces. Some of my favorites below:
I was excited for the Monet exhibit and it was nicely laid out with a good number of pieces. But I was a little disappointed. Let me put it this way, Monet’s work is really lovely, the paintings of Venice and the water lily paintings were beautiful and absolutely showed the talent and skill that the master possessed. But for me, art is not just about skill and beauty, for me personally, what makes me love a piece of art is if it moves me emotionally. My favorite painter is Van Gogh, and in Massachusetts several years ago I saw an exhibit of mostly lesser known pieces except for two, Wheatfields and Starry Night. The thing is though, almost every piece in the collection moved me in some small way, whether it was a village, a portrait, a field of wheat or an evening sky, something in Van Gogh’s work taps emotion in me. It’s this metric that makes Rodin’s sculpture of Saint John the Baptist my favorite piece of art. Decades ago a Rodin exhibit came to the museum in Knoxville, Tennessee while I was there in graduate school. I went to the exhibit, excited to see The Thinker and his enormous gate sculptures. The exhibit was incredibly impressive but much like Monet’s paintings, while I recognized the talent, skill and beauty of the pieces I wasn’t particularly moved. They had set up some of the pieces in a bit of a twisty maze of curtains so that you’d turn the corner and be face to face with the next piece. I was going through this part of the exhibit when I had the most amazing art experience of my life. I turned the corner and was face to face with St. John the Baptist, looking directly into the sculpture’s eyes and I started to weep. The piece touched me immediately and deeply in a way I cannot explain or understand but I was stunned. I spent an inordinate amount of time with that piece and it was an incredible experience.
I left the De Young and walked a winding route back to the Civic Center Bart station, strolling around Golden Gate Park.
I strolled through the Haight-Ashbury District.
And back down through Hayes Valley to BART, but this also meant I got to make pizza stops at both Escape from NY and Gioia Pizzeria, the two best slice places in the city.
Two amazing slices from Gioia Pizzeria
I really love my walking days in the city. Today was really wonderful, the weather was absolutely perfect, Golden Gate Park was full of people and music. I did a drive at the beginning up to the De Young in a Waymo, and doing a robot taxi is always a blast and our robot overloads always remind us who is in control.
And yes, Waymos are Jaguars, so they’re really nice vehicles, today it even did a right on red which was a bit of a surprise to me. So great weather, a five mile walk and some great pizza make for a really wonderful and happy day in San Francisco my friends. ~ Rev Kane
The Ministry of Happiness 