I Remember California
Apr. 19th, 2005 11:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dmaze I'm now old enough that I don't find wine tasting boring and irritating. Though I don't have a terribly refined palate for such things. My dad could ask if a particular wine had a particular kind of grape and get it right. Didn't think the "reserve" wines were particularly better than the normal wines.
Though the whole wine-tasting thing is a little weird. Is it really worthwhile for wineries to build large, somewhat ornate buildings for a couple of people at a time to go in, sample wine, and buy a bottle or two? Napa clearly doesn't have the transportation infrastructure to handle the load, but we drove up the Sonoma valley instead and it wasn't so bad. It just doesn't feel like the incremental revenue from the wine you'd sell makes up for the cost of building and maintaining the building.
Looking at maps, Skyline Drive is mostly continuous from inside San Francisco to somewhere in the Santa Cruz mountains, excepting the bit where you need to cut across on 92 and the bits where they built 280 on top of it. But it looks like you can still bike from one end to the other, hence the "bicycles must exit" signs on 280. I wouldn't bike there. But the mad bikers going across the mountains on route 9 do stick in my memory; 35 south of 9 (which is pretty far from where I was) could be nice.
They finally finished 87 through downtown and by the San Jose airport. Only an exit at Taylor Street, not at Hedding. Sections south of downtown are still bumpy. The rest of San Jose seems pretty much the same; different stores in the strip malls, Oakridge is bigger, but all pretty familiar.
I think the tree at my high school is still there, but it doesn't have a sign any more. The football stadium is now the Pat Tillman stadium. This annoys me a lot: I know speaking ill of the dead is bad and he's a Hero (TM), but my high school had sufficiently splufty academics, speech and debate team, newspaper, &c. that naming a major feature after a dumb jock who tried to copy off my biology test seems wrong, even if he Died For His Country After Giving Up A Lucrative Pro Football Career.
Switching from early spring to late spring and back was a little weird. But it seemed like everything was getting ready to switch from green to brown there.
Aforementioned Married Woman (also, "my best friend from elementary school") seemed surprised that, as far as she knew, she was the first person from our high school social group to get married. But nobody's really kept in touch. Oddness of it being okay for people in their mid-to-late 20s to get married, but not for People Our Age.
Though the whole wine-tasting thing is a little weird. Is it really worthwhile for wineries to build large, somewhat ornate buildings for a couple of people at a time to go in, sample wine, and buy a bottle or two? Napa clearly doesn't have the transportation infrastructure to handle the load, but we drove up the Sonoma valley instead and it wasn't so bad. It just doesn't feel like the incremental revenue from the wine you'd sell makes up for the cost of building and maintaining the building.
Looking at maps, Skyline Drive is mostly continuous from inside San Francisco to somewhere in the Santa Cruz mountains, excepting the bit where you need to cut across on 92 and the bits where they built 280 on top of it. But it looks like you can still bike from one end to the other, hence the "bicycles must exit" signs on 280. I wouldn't bike there. But the mad bikers going across the mountains on route 9 do stick in my memory; 35 south of 9 (which is pretty far from where I was) could be nice.
They finally finished 87 through downtown and by the San Jose airport. Only an exit at Taylor Street, not at Hedding. Sections south of downtown are still bumpy. The rest of San Jose seems pretty much the same; different stores in the strip malls, Oakridge is bigger, but all pretty familiar.
I think the tree at my high school is still there, but it doesn't have a sign any more. The football stadium is now the Pat Tillman stadium. This annoys me a lot: I know speaking ill of the dead is bad and he's a Hero (TM), but my high school had sufficiently splufty academics, speech and debate team, newspaper, &c. that naming a major feature after a dumb jock who tried to copy off my biology test seems wrong, even if he Died For His Country After Giving Up A Lucrative Pro Football Career.
Switching from early spring to late spring and back was a little weird. But it seemed like everything was getting ready to switch from green to brown there.
Aforementioned Married Woman (also, "my best friend from elementary school") seemed surprised that, as far as she knew, she was the first person from our high school social group to get married. But nobody's really kept in touch. Oddness of it being okay for people in their mid-to-late 20s to get married, but not for People Our Age.
ornate buildings
Date: 2005-04-21 03:39 pm (UTC)