Tiburon Blue & Gold Blues: Sunday, November 2nd!

It is more often from pride than from ignorance that we are so obstinately opposed to current opinions; we find the first places taken, and we do not want to be the last. -Francois De La Rochefoucauld, moralist (1613-1680) 

Glasgow has just gone for a short walk. Once he's back we will ride down Ashby to the BART station and take it to Embarcadero. From there we'll make our way, along the water, to ride over Golden Gate. Not sure if we will take ferry back from Sausalito or retrace our earlier route. Will depend on how we feel once over bridge. Cheers, Il Conduttore! Pics: One shows jeans we bought for the Babes we'll be meeting in Calaveras!

Today Glasgow and I rode over the Golden Gate. From Berkeley, over the Golden Gate to Tiburon, (with a little help from BART from Ashby to Embarcadero and from the Blue & Gold Fleet to SF), and back. Glorious, glorious day so who could ask for anything more! Stats for ride:

http://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/625316372#.VFbafXBBzFw.email

Nadienka Wyss  — with Thomas Hohl.

Ä perfekte Tag ir Natur!

P, Thanks for stopping by to see the M squared play their match. And also grateful for the vino which is tasty stuff. The bakery in Berkeley is the Cheese Board. John lives near there. Lemme know the coordinates for meeting tomorrow, when you know. W P, Can you send a pic of the lads on court. Me Jane has requested...Thanks, W 

Patrick, Please shoot me an email tomorrow when you figure out your itinerary. Am going to the grocery store and with make sure I have whatever is needed for breakfast. Hope your trip was great. Marilyn

Gloomy day here. Off to take mom to canada tire for new pots. Chloe coming for supper. Went to movie and dinner with Joanne. She is having coffee with Frank today. Enjoy. The foothills. Love you C

Hey Patrick, Great to hear from you, all is well here thanks for asking. All the gang at West Point say hi, Andrea said a big HELLO :D. We are starting to
quieten down now so a well deserved break for all of us.

I will be sure to pass it on to Christine, she may know Ashley as I believe they are a fairly small team in North America. Its kind of crazy running into a Trek travel trip like that but I suppose they are getting more and more popular.

The riding looks great. I hope the weather is treating you well down there and not too much rain. As I write this it is currently pouring here. Sierra Nevada is supposed to be a great location for the red juice which I'm sure you are already well aware of. Well I hope you enjoy the rest of your time down there and soak up any good weather you get. Chat soon Matt

We had a simply incredible ride today. Left at just before 10:00 am and had decided to ride down to above-mentioned BART station so that we wouldn't have to worry about parking car, etc. No trouble with bikes on train and we stopped at Embarcadero. Walked a couple of blocks to the SF Ferry Terminal Building and were soon on bike path, heading for Golden Gate. Few spots where dedicated bike lane vanishes and one had to vie with streetcars but after we left busy part of waterfront behind, it was smooth, smooth sailing.

What a gorgeous, stupendous approach to bridge deck and I threw Burning Ground caution to the wind, stopping often to snap pictures. Couple of steep climbs, as you might know, but nothing that fazed us. 

Loads of people as SF Half-Marathon had just finished. Also many, many hard-core bikers so we were "the tourists" we whine about on Seawall. Some rode, we agreed, dangerously, inasmuch as there were families with small children on bikes. The corners around the main support columns are very sharp and narrow yet people were taking them far too quickly for my comfort, at least. Anyway, it was more than an exhilarating experience. Once over the bridge we stopped to decide what we might do and a couple of women pulled up close to us. A few seconds later, one of them collapsed, falling off her bike as she slumped sideways. I though thse was having a seizure. Matt went to assist as he was closer. 

Fortunately, turned out she knew she was going to faint as she felt dizzy before fall. Think she might have banged one of her knees but other than that she seemed fine. Once she sat up and assured everyone she felt OK I asked her if she had a hangover! She agreed that she was probably dehydrated and they had just come up from Sausalito, a very, very arduous climb. At any rate, we wished her well and took off down the same hill. A very good reason to take ferry from Sausalito! As it turned out we decided to ride to Tiburon. It was such a glorious day, even warmer than in Berkeley, and the bike path so good that we didn't want to stop. 

Met numerous other bikers who pointed us in the right direction when path ahead was not obvious but otherwise we had little if any difficulty. Once we reached Tiburon we kept going along Paradise Drive, similar, in many ways to Marine out to Horshoe Bay, but much higher above ocean. We went about have way to Larkspur Landing and then stopped to have the wonderful sandwiches David had made for us.

A short break we headed back to Tiburon. Had about 41 km on the clock by then and felt is was enough mileage for Glasgow. I think I'd have proceeded to Larkspur if I'd been on my own but was quite content to save such a ride for another visit. 

Back at Tiburon we had to wait for about 15 minutes for next ferry but we started chatting with a very friendly young couple, themselves out for the day, from SF. Once on the ferry I sat with them. Matt wanted to sit on upper deck to enjoy spectacular views and remarkable day. I popped up for a short while but was happy to sit inside and chat. They have been to Vancouver to ski at Whistler so know the city a bit. Since we were first in line to board our bikes were "buried" at the end of the storage area, with hundreds, literally, of other bikes from both Tiburon and then Sausalito passengers. System works well so our bikes were fine.  

Once we were back at Fisherman's Wharf we exchanged cards and it turned out that Mimi and Terry own a small Korean restaurant. (I thought that they were of Chinese origin.) They would have invited us there but it is closed on Sunday. Anyway, we took a few snaps and then waved goodbye. Hope our paths will cross in the future and it would be fun to try their restaurant, Stone Korean Kitchen, next time we happen to be in SF. It is not far from Embarcadero BART station.  On our own, we retraced our steps, on the dedicated bike lane, back to Embarcadero and had to change once as only certain trains run on weekends. Back at Ashby by shortly after 5:00 pm. Traffic was fairly light so ride was not at all worrisome. Even steepness of incline, once past Claremont Hotel, wasn't nearly as bad as we'd imagined so not too, too much huffing and puffing to reach our extremely comfortable digs on Vicente.

Matt went to have a shower but I looked for overlefts in our fridge as Barbara had said we should use up anything we liked. Found a very tasty salmon casserole so that was to be our main dish. Then popped up to Casa Vicnete and gang were just leaving for a French restaurant. It was Rod's, (David's brother's), last night before flying back to Salem, so the three of them were out for dinner. I purloined salad fixings from their fridge and then went back to have my own shower. Barbara has a suite on the lower level of her home and on Friday we met Raoul, from Peru, who has lived there for 8 years, a wonderful chap who has been working at UC Berkeley for over 20 years. 

Unfortunately, a couple of years ago he suffered some very serious eye trouble and has been on disability ever since. On the brighter side, he plans to return to work shortly as the vision in affected eye, left, is slowly improving or at least stabilizing. Anyway, we invited him to join us for dinner and drinks. He was pleased to do and we had a grand time getting to know one another a bit better, over the course of the "cobbled" meal. Heard a knock on the door and it was The Freeloaders, back from the restaurant so they joined us for a couple of bottles of wine. Red flows very freely since they discovered the two cases of 2008 Coffaro I'd not known I had in their crawl space! Busy day for everyone so we said goodnight around 11:00 pm and it was straight to bed for me, dreaming about the Golden Gate as I dropped off.  

See you at Ashby BART Station at 10:00 pm unless I hear otherwise. Cheers, Il Conduttore!

Pics: Golden Gate; lunch break; Mimi and Terry.

Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, S. C. Gwynne, Scribner a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.,2014:

Legendary Civil War General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson had a deeply tragic childhood. But that was not altogether unusual in America in the early 1800s: "Thomas ['Stonewall' Jackson] and [his sister] Laura were born in very modest circumstances in Clarksburg, Virginia, a river junction town in the mountains and narrow valleys of far northwestern Virginia, not far from Ohio and Pennsylvania. (The area is now part of West Virginia.) 

Their father, Jonathan Jackson, was a failed country lawyer, a poor business manager, and a compulsive gambler whose main talent seemed to be running up large debts. Their mother, Julia Neale, from nearby Parkersburg on the Ohio River, seems to have been a much better sort, described by contemporaries as 'very intelligent' and having a 'comely and engaging countenance' and 'a graceful and commanding presence.'

"Jonathan and Julia married in 1817, and set up housekeeping in Clarksburg. They had three children: Elizabeth in 1819, Warren in 1821, and Thomas in 1824. They struggled financially. While Julia was pregnant with her fourth child, typhoid fever killed six-year-old Elizabeth. Less than a month later, her husband, Jonathan, died from the same illness. The day after his death Julia gave birth to a daughter, Laura. Julia was now, at twenty-eight, a widow with two small children and an infant.
 

"She was also destitute, and soon accepted the charity of the local Masonic order, which offered her the use of a tiny, twelve-foot-square, one-room house. She sewed, taught school, and somehow managed to feed her children her situation did not improve. Her children were pitiable sights in town, wearing ragged clothes and sometimes accepting the charity of local merchants and tradesmen. In 1830, when Tom was six, Julia met and married a man fifteen years her senior named Blake Woodson, another hard-luck country lawyer, but this time with eight children of his own scattered in various places. Desperate to save her family, she had made another mistake, worse than the first one: Woodson not only made little money but was harsh and verbally abusive to the family. The family moved far from Clarksburg, to the tiny hamlet of New Haven (now Ansted), south-east of Charleston, so that Blake could take a government job. He and Julia struggled and fell deeper into debt. She was soon pregnant again. 

"By the fall of 1831 there was so little money left that Julia decided, reluctantly but with no real choice, to send her children away. [The infant] Warren would live with Neale relatives in Parkersburg. Seven-year-old Tom, as he was known, and five-year-old Laura would travel north to live with a collection of Jackson relatives at a place called Jackson's Mill, eighteen miles south of Clarksburg near the town of Weston. Little Tom begged not to be sent away, and when an uncle and his slave arrived to fetch them, he hid in the woods. When he left home, on the back of a horse, his mother wept uncontrollably. A month later, she gave birth to a boy, William Wirt Woodson. Three months later Tom and Laura were back in the same place, watching their mother die. She had fallen ill and had summoned her children to say good-bye. On December 4, 1831, she passed away. Tom and Laura, now orphaned, went back to the mill. ...(Blake Woodson remarried and died penniless a year and a half later.) ...

"In spite of the relative comforts of Jackson's Mill, there was one more dislocating trauma the children would have to face. Four years after they arrived there -- they were now eleven and nine years old -- their step-grandmother Eizabeth Jackson died, an event with life-changing consequences for the children. Because the two maiden aunts had married and left the mill, Elizabeth had been the sole remaining female on the compound, which meant that the only people left to care for Tom and Laura were bachelor uncles and the slaves. To Neales and Jacksons alike, this was unacceptable. 

So Tom and Laura were sent away again. Laura went to Parkersburg with a Neale aunt; Tom went to a farm near Clarksburg owned by his father's sister Polly and her husband, Isaac Brake. Though Laura found a warm new home, Tom found nothing but a troublesome relationship with his uncle Isaac, who disparaged him, treated him like an outsider, and gave him at least one hard whipping.

"A year later, Tom could endure it no longer. He ran away. In Clarksburg he told relatives that he was not going back. When a cousin begged him to return to the Brakes, he said simply, yet for a twelve-year-old boy quite stubbornly, 'Maybe I ought to, ma'am, but I am not going to.' 

The next day he walked eighteen miles to Jackson's Mill, where Cummins Jackson happily welcomed him back. He spent the rest of his childhood in that sturdy masculine environment, attending several small, rural schools and working alternately for Cummins and at a variety of jobs that included surveying, teaching school, and serving warrants and collecting delinquent accounts as constable for Lewis County. His childhood was, in that regard, not altogether exceptional for someone from that rural county in Virginia in the 1830s. ... Nor was Jackson's orphanhood -- for all that has been made of it -- terribly unusual. Outbreaks of typhoid, yellow fever, and smallpox were common at the time, destroying families and leaving children bereft of parents. (The early 1800s were the heyday of orphanage-building in America.)"