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Catching up a bit on events from the last month here…

My good friend Dawn from high school back home lost her Dad back in Sept to heart failure. Dennis was always a really great guy – funny guy and a great Dad. Very sad to be without him now for all of Dawn’s family.

We invited Dawn and her two boys M & G out for several days to visit and see California a bit. They got an early flight from NJ/NY and with a few stops/changes along the way finally made it out to SFO late in the morning. For getting up so early, to boys seemed to have plenty of energy, but that soon faded:

We stopped off in San Francisco at North Beach Pizza (North Beach is the ‘little Italy’ of San Fran) and got everyone some lunch and a recharge.

After lunch, we made our way back down to San Jose and stopped in at the Winchester Mystery House. For folks not familiar with it, it was bought and built up by Sarah Winchester, the widow of William Winchester of Winchester Rifles. After her husbands death, she bought this farmhouse and her medium advised her to ward off the spirits of the people killed by her husband’s rifles by doing continuous construction on the house. The house is the result of 38 years of constant 24×7 building with no particular master plan and a good dose of paranoia/mental issues.

There were a bunch of these spider-web designed windows in the house:

There is a museum off the side of the house that holds a large collection of antique Winchester rifles and other arms:

The next day, we went back up to San Francisco to visit Alcatraz – note that I’ve lived around here for 12 yrs now and never once managed to visit this. I suck. But anyway, it was a bit drizzly and foggy, but that only made it spookier for the boys, who absolutely loved the place.

Approaching the prison from the ferry:

We thought about putting the boys into a cell, but they were too wise to fall for that:

After Alcatraz, we wandered to a crabbery on Fisherman’s Wharf for lunch where M devoured a dungeoness crab. Very messy, but yet tasty. We wrapped up our San Francisco day by a tour of Coit Tower at sunset and got some good views of the city at nite plus the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges.

The next day we went up to Gold Country to see some of the old towns there plus tour a real gold mine in Sutter Creek. Everyone got to wear a hard hat and we took a mine car down 500+ ft into an operational hard rock gold mine, with a grizzled old miner as our tour guide. This guy was great – his family has been mining in CA since the early days of the gold rush. I need to find the pics I took of him tho – must be on the video recorder. He really fit the vision of an old fashioned miner.

After the mine tour and lunch, we found a back road to another old/small town, Volcano. It had been mentioned as a ghost town, but alas, many people still live there and M & G were noting that it didn’t seem very ghostly.

This is an old hydraulic mining monitor (cannon). They would get water under pressure and blast away at the hillsides to find gold. See the movie Pale Rider for a good example of how bad this practice was. They literally needed an act of Congress to stop it because of the damage it was causing to the environment.