Points in between: Pit stop in Los Alamos

It's really not a big deal to get from SF to LA. You've got multiple flights and highways to choose from and you can get there in minimal amount of time. But like going anywhere, the getting there can be where the real riches are found. Last week we pointed the car down the 101, chosen because it splits the difference between the speed and monotony of the 5 and the beauty and leisure of the 1.  Per usual, we filled up the hours in the car, reading aloud and listening to the blues station, but we hadn't planned anything along the route, other than fueling the car and ourselves as needed. So a bit of foodie providence found us stopping in Los Alamos, a little town located in Santa Barbara County, aka smack in the middle of wine country. As well as hosting the only surviving depot of the Pacific Coast Railway — Los Alamos was a stagecoach stop in 1876 but got its PCR depot in 1882 — it also contains several notable eateries.

After sussing out the slightly sleepy main street, we somewhat naively wandered into Bell Street Farm with our guitar cases in hand (having been burned hard once, the guitars always come in)  because a) it was open at 4pm and b) it had a sign that said picnic supplies.
"Yay the musicians arrived," a man in a cowboy had exclaimed as we walked in which is always the right thing to say to two people with guitar cases whether they are planning on playing or not. The man in the hat was owner Jamie Gluck, who opened Bell St slightly over a year ago in a former bank, after vacationing in Los Alamos for years. He handed us menus full of farm-to-table goodness (salads, soups, fresh baked bread, pulled chicken and port, cheese plates...you get the idea), insisted I try the wine he was pouring, and greeted everyone who walked in with equal cheer. We felt like we'd found the party.  While talking to Gluck and the other diners, we happily dined on a couple of exceedingly well-constructed sandwiches. We also met local wine-maker Angela Osborne of Grace Wine Company, who found her way from New Zealand to Los Alamos on a search for the best Grenache. A satisfying pit stop on all counts. If we weren't on the road and playing elsewhere that night, we would have stayed and tried more of the wine.

Nonetheless, before we left, Osborne told us where to find her wine in the East Bay. So last night, with cause to celebrate, we found our way to The Punchdown Wine Bar in downtown Oakland for a glass of her "Tribute to Grace" Grenache. Full of fruity, smokey goodness, it provided a fine toast. Here's to grace!

California Love & Freedom

Driving up the 101 from a weekend spent in Irvine for Far West, following the Presidential debate and the Giants game on my Twitter feed, I reflected anew on how incredibly grateful I am to have grown up and still live in California. As we made our way north, from the beaches to the agricultural fields and rolling hills of the Central Coast, the Giants were winning and the debate... was giving me pause. My renewed gratitude for growing up in California wasn't completely about the game. It was about how fortunate I felt have lived amid diversity and varied lifestyles, freedom of speech and choice, and general encouragement for finding and expressing one's voice, and that I generally experience this on a daily basis.
"This is the best place there is," my dad, a WWII vet and native of San Francisco, used to tell me. Of course, I didn't believe him for many years, until I'd traversed much of the globe, and lived in a different state, double-checking for myself. And so California has always found me circling back. Its varied physical beauty, is of course a major draw, but the varied terrain reflects an equally diverse population I've come to expect.  Living in the Bay Area most of my life, I've been privy not only to beaches and mountains, but exposed to seemingly every color, denomination and mode of expression there is...and — mistakenly — thought it was that way everywhere. I so often take this for granted when the precariousness of our rights is highlighted by the gravity of what's at stake during an election. Especially, it seems, this one. I'm glad I get to inform myself and to vote. I very much hope you are too.

Coming Ashore: across the West in 10 days

Along Highway 128 in Utah

We just returned from our 'Come Ashore Tour,' 10 days of driving up and over The Sierra Nevada and The Rocky Mountains. As with most every trip I've taken, it took me about 3 or 4 days to really sink into the fact that I could let go of my routine and get into the groove of where next...but once I did, it was a full trip. A trip that included all of it: beautiful views and tired-from-being-on-the-road-too-long eyes, letting go of usual routines and developing new habits (including taking more pictures on Instagram than writing), soaking in hot springs, playing music at a variety of venues including living rooms and music stores, visiting family, discovering the wonders of Airbnb, revisiting former home towns, eating pie at almost every opportunity, cowriting in parks and reading the The New Yorker aloud across Nevada. We saw a good cross section of Western wildlife, including many birds (Ibis, Sandhill Cranes), native mammals (moose (!), bobcat, and at least one 'mystery ungulate), and a few lizards amid a lot of road construction. Amazingly, while there were definitely a good number of U-turns made, we didn't get lost. By the trip's end of course, the trip was the routine...  now it's going to take me a few days to realize I'm home. 

On the road: SF x LA

Filling station: Love's

“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll 

Love's Travel Store. The necessary evil of road trips circa 2012. We filled up the tank somewhere on I5 just as this tanker filled Love's tanks. Whoa. Fuel. There's a lot of it getting burnt up in these parts, somewhere between SF and LA, day 1 of the Local Music Vibe trip to Austin. Poet Karen Hildebrand alerted me to the fact that March 12 is even Jack Keroac's birthday, a befitting time to take in some tarmac.
Things have certainly changed since Jack's time (he published On the Road in 1951). There are 1 million more public road miles and the US population has more than doubled so the West feels less wild and wooly than ever.  But the meaning of going on the road — that potential finding of something that you wouldn't have found if you didn't leave or having some sort of epiphany— really hasn't changed.  And so I always get excited about setting out ...even if it means a lot of hours of car time. Even if the first leg is all familiar ground!
 I'm not sure what Jack drove, and riding in a Econoline has a whole different flavor than, say, a Cadillac. There are more logistics given the van is full of music gear and our day's journey was to end on the outskirts of LA proper. So we didn't go cruising the Sunset Strip or other Hollywood musician haunts. Nor did the timing work for a stop at Kulak's Woodshed, my vote for coolest open mic in LA.  Nonetheless, and most importantly, we made it to our destination safely.