"Making History" |
THE TOURIST 10 September 2005 "I made a reservation for 5:30, and I asked for a table by the window," she said. It was going to be a good night. I was taking my mother to one of our favorite restaurants, The Spinnaker, on the bay in Sausalito, overlooking San Francisco, to celebrate her 86th birthday.
It's a great seafood restaurant, a bit pricey, but worth it. Not many places where you can get good crab, especially not in Davis. We've been there several times, but the time I remember most was when we "had lunch with Alan Alda." We were eating at our table and suddenly Alda arrives, all 8 feet of him, with two other people. They took him to the back of the restaurant, where his group had a table all to themselves, and Alda ate with his back to the rest of the room. I thought how sad it was that this is the price of celebrity--that you can't go out to dinner without worrying that someone is going to intrude on your privacy. We could not have asked for a more perfect evening. The air was clear, with wisps of fog starting to roll in across the Golden Gate Bridge, which we could see peeking out over the top of the Sausalito hills (until it became totally engulfed in fog).
The city shimmered and I got out my camera.
The thing about me is that though I was born and raised in San Francisco and still travel to the city on a regular basis, I'm a bigger tourist than any other out-of-towner I've given a tour to. How many photos can you have of the city skyline or the bridges or all the familiar landmarks? Yet, whenever I'm escorting someone around, I'm generally the one who takes the most photos (and usually buys the most souvenirs!) So I took some great photos of the city and the ships that were heading out from the port of Oakland, out under the Golden Gate Bridge, and back to their home ports.
I just continued to snap away at photos of things I must have a bazillion photos of already--but somehow each time I see the city, it looks fresh and new and I want to capture it.
And the salad tastes good too! We were both stuffed after our Ceasar salad and crab fetuccini, but we decided we'd split a dessert (it was a birthday party, after all!). Of all the desserts on the menu, the "berry trifle" sounded the lightest. We were VERY glad when it arrived that we had chosen to share it!
But it was delicious, and the waitress added a candle for my mother's birthday.
Best of all, when we left the restaurant, the fog had rolled in and it was downright cold. I can't remember the last time I felt cold and I loved it! Then I came home to try to figure out which of the 33 photos I took will make it to Flickr. It may sound silly, but I love being a tourist in and around my home town!
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PHOTO OF THE DAY
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Created 8/15/05
The Spinnaker is one of the few restaurants that still makes
an "authentic" Ceasar salad, complete with anchovies and raw egg. They mix
it at your table, chopping anchovies into impossibly small pieces, adding the oil and
balsamic vinegar (13 years old, if you please) and then toss it all in an impossibly huge
bowl. Much pomp and circumstance and a nice bit of entertainment.
