Last weekend was something of a highlight, and an anomaly. Sket & Sean were here, as I’ll get to eventually, and they suggested heading up to Napa to see Sean’s uncle, Mike. As it turns out, we drove up to Petaluma, met Mike at the marina, and then spent the afternoon on Mike’s boat, along with co-owner Jerry and a bunch of his family and their friends and woo, a surprisingly social weekend. It’s been far too long since I was on a boat; the second I set just one foot onboard it felt like a familiar homecoming. I miss the water. I can’t remember the last time I went swimming. I had hoped this weekend to head to the beach, but a general feeling of crappiness saw me housebound.
Anyway, Saturday; after hanging on the boat for the afternoon, Sean, Sket & I went over to Mike’s place in Napa for a few hours, before heading down into S.F. to catch up with Mike’s kids; Sean’s cousins. That was a bit of a pain to get to – didn’t take long from Napa, and it’s not a bad drive (though Petaluma <-> Napa is where it’s at), but once we got down to the Bay bridge, well, everything stopped as expected. The worst was after the bridge; once we go within ten blocks of pier 39 the traffic just stopped, utterly. It wasn’t that the traffic itself was bad, but that there were tens of thousands of people leaving all at once, having stayed solely for the fireworks. They were just flooding the streets, blocking traffic.
It took about two hours, from getting off 80 after the bridge, to get to a carpark. Not a whole lot of fun.
But we made it, and caught up with Sean’s cousins et al. One of them, Avery, was quite entertaining. They’d all been at the grog since early in the afternoon, and Avery was a wee bit worse for wear. A happy drunk, though, such that he largely just sat there, or stood in the middle of the moshpit dancefloor staring at one particular girl, who was amusingly oblivious to him. At one point he took his shirt off. At another a girl was trying to dance up next to him, overtly interested, but he didn’t even know she was there.
The place was the Fiddler’s Green, in a completely random spot just up from the cable car terminal. At least one of the bartenders was completely wasted, and kept having vaguely aggressive, painfully slow arguments with various patrons. Overall an entertaining little bar, but I wouldn’t bother trying to actually get a drink in the place.
So I think that’s the most eventful 4th of July I’ve had thus far. Though I think one was spent at F2’s place, which wasn’t half bad either. It was nice to get out into the festivities, even if I don’t care for the holiday itself.
