On Tuesday we enjoyed a fine dinner at Hollins House with Howard and Sue Schwartz and Dave and Donna Horne. The Schwartzes have a second home on Orcas Island, Washington, and the Hornes have one in Big Sky, Montana, and we hope to visit both of those exciting sites in the coming year.
On Wednesday Mark Bright, the buyer of our Ben Lomond home, treated us to dinner at the recently opened Angler in San Francisco, of which Mark is part owner with his partner, the brilliant chef Joshua Skenes.
What a restaurant! Right on the Embarcadero, there are views of the Bay Bridge and the impressive buildings lining the San Francisco Bay waterfront. The menu is extremely high-end and focused on seafood. We were served elk tartare, an untraditional Caeser salad, tuna tartare, and tiny abalones ... and my favorite course was deep-fried rabbit with an amazing seasoned red crust.
Mark is the wine director there, and he served us several delicious glasses. Even though opening night was only a couple of weeks earlier, the restaurant was full, and most of the customers were hip young people. We fit right in.
Truly, the San Francisco scene seems like another world compared with the RV parks we've been living in. I guess we could get used to that lifestyle but it would be a sea change. We're very grateful to Mark for letting us spend a bit of time in his universe.
On Thursday, back in Santa Cruz, we had dinner with Ray and Sue Brown at Eric's Deli, a more modest establishment.
On Friday we attended Mark Wainer's photography show at the Blitzer Gallery in Santa Cruz. Over many years he has developed amazing photoshop techniques for altering the photographs he has taken to produce images that are half photography, half original art. There are images of flowers and neighborhoods and photographs taken during his recent trips to Iran and the Altiplano region of South America. Innovative and beautiful. Do yourself a favor and visit his show, which will run for several weeks. You'll be impressed.
Then on Saturday Mark Bright and his wife Tingting celebrated the coming birth of their first child, a son, by hosting a fancy lunch in the drawing room/living room of our old homestead in Ben Lomond.
Most of the guests were heavy hitters from San Francisco. A local chef cooked several great courses for us. Tingting looked beautiful in an elegant blue maternity dress.
Still hungry, that same evening we had a very tasty dinner in Aptos at the home of Harry and Norma Domash.
Our visit to Santa Cruz was exciting, and exhausting. Several pounds heavier, we packed up our motorhome, retrieved a few items from our storage unit in Scotts Valley, and left Smithwood's RV Resort in Felton, one of our least favorite campgrounds, and headed up to one of our favorites, Napa Valley Expo RV Park. I drove the motorhome, towing our pickup truck, and Nancy followed in our new car - a Genesis G-80. (Look it up.) We'll spend a week here exploring Napa and the wonderful surrounding winelands and restaurants.
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