To Davis and Beyond

This will be a little disjointed: I’ve already written up a post about our exciting Late Nite activities Saturday, but it’s on my laptop, and I’m writing this on [friend, not son] Oliver’s desktop. So Sunday will come before Saturday night.

We got up lateish this morning, and found the silverorange boys either asleep, off to start their day, or simply not taking our calls. As such, we proceeded to a rather moribund breakfast at a place with an excellent veneer of sunflower goodness and abysmal food. This we followed with a mandatory make-up coffee, and a walk through Chinatown on a sunnny Sunday morning.

Then it was time for Johnny and Jodi to take their leave back to Vancouver, and for me to head northeast to Davis to rendezvous with Oliver and Sophie.

I took the stunningly efficient California transit system [at least by comparison to PEI, with transit that is stunningly absent] — a BART subway to the Amtrak train — from downtown San Francisco to Davis, and arrived around two. Oliver was there at the platform to meet me, and we had a pleasant lunch on the patio, followed by a strong [at least for me] cup of coffee.

We dropped in on Sophie for a bit, and then took a walk through an interesting prototypical community called Village Homes that borders their house (an interesting “backwards” approach to urban planning, with all of the houses facing a common, and the streets a secondary rather than primary feature) and the Davis Wetlands, which uses natural features as part of the city’s sewage treatment process.

Back at Oliver and Sophie’s, we had a dinner of fondue, and then sat down to watch the DVD of Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me, a film by our oddly mutual acquaintance Tessa Blake (for those of you playing the home game: I came to know Tessa through Ian; they came through PEI on their honeymoon, and then came up to Zap Your PRAM; Oliver knows Ian because he followed a link on my website way back when, but also because Sophie’s sister in law used to date Chip, one of Ian’s best friends. It is as complicated as it sounds. And more.)

Tomorrow we’re off to Berkeley to the chocolate factory. It’s also the day that Oliver and Sophie find, by virtue of VIRMP, where they’ll be moving come the end of June.

Stay tuned.