Typical Day on the Road
a Travel Journal

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April 29

Stopped in Boccherini's Coffee Shop in Albany, OR. to get online.

April 28

Hip-hip hooray, our mail was there. And both Dennis and Kimberly received a summons to report for jury duty in Los Angeles. (Dennis was scheduled to report TODAY!!) This was the sixth and seventh time that one of us has been summoned, even though we keep telling them that our address in Burbank is only a mailing address, and we are in Los Angeles county only a few HOURS per year, and there is no way we ever could serve on a jury. (We didn't go to L.A. last year at all, and probably won't this year either.) The interesting thing is that we are NOT allowed to use this address to register for voting.

With our mission accomplished in Fairfield, we started driving north for our next booking. We made it all the way to Eugene tonight. This is the first time we've been there without visiting one of Kimberly's grandmothers, who both passed away last year.

April 27

Return engagement at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center, joined by Libby. Also Tania came, and brought a friend who was of Korean extraction (and she apparently revealed to Tania that "Goza" means something less than complimentary in Korean).

We then drove Libby home to Vallejo, taking the northern route across the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time in ages. She really is a grand old landmark. Afer visiting Libby's folks for well into the evening (during which time both Kimberly and Zephyr took advantage of Libby's status as an aspiring masseuse), we said our goodbyes and headed to nearby Fairfield for the night, so we can check for mail again first thing in the morning.

April 26

A very interesting day, one of the rare occasions when we all were able to go our separate ways. Zephyr, who stayed the night in Vallejo, caught BART into San Francisco and then explored Chinatown in quest of accessories for his haunted attraction and costumed character ventures. Kimberly caught BART to meet up with her old high school friend Tania (who was celebrating a birthday) and then went on to visit two other high school friends, Carol and Patty. Dennis drove the RV to the scheduled rendezvous point near the Daly City BART station, and then decided on the spur of the moment to catch a train into The City himself and wander around for the first time in ages. He got off at Powell Street, where a group of activists were warning people about the dangers of Scientology, then walked up Market Street where he succumbed to the temptation to play a game of chess against one of four hustlers who were playing challengers for 5 bucks. (He lost, but it was a good game.) Then he caught a bus out to the beach and strolled by the ocean and up to our old neighborhood on 42nd Avenue (yes, we lived in a "stick house" once upon a time) and caught the N Judah streetcar (which we used to ride regularly) back downtown along with a horde of baseball fans headed to a Giants game.

Zephyr's friend Libby came home with him to spend the night (you may recall that we adopted her for a whole month last fall) and Kimberly was dropped off by Patty, who also brought along her teenage son and daughter to meet Zephyr. It was quite a mirthful gathering on the sidewalk, and we were almost surprised the neghbors didn't call police to complain about the noise.

April 25

Pulled up to the San Jose airport this morning to drop Sarah off. Her plane was supposed to leave at noon, but once we got there we spent a great deal of time searching for her phone which had suddenly turned up missing, and the security guards were of course giving us a hard time about being stopped there for so long. And in the midst of it all, we suddenly discovered that in fact her plane was scheduled to leave from Oakland rather than San Jose, so we made a mad dash to get over there in time. En route, Sarah informed us that while inside the San Jose terminal, she'd had her flight switched to 4:30, so there was no need to rush after all.

Arriving in Oakland, we concentrated our efforts on locating the missing phone. She'd left it on vibrate, so we at first were not able to hear it when we dialed the number on our own phone. Finally, however, we did hear it buzzing and managed to narrow down its whereabouts as being somewhere under our couch. But a thorough search failed to turn it up -- until we realized that by some quirk of physics, it had ended up on top of our water tank, in a thin space under the couch. With some difficulty we retrieved it and then put Sarah on the plane in plenty of time.

Zephyr jumped on BART to go visit friends in Vallejo, and Mom and Dad decided to watch the Steve Martin movie "Bowfinger".

April 24

Performed at the Lodi Library, yet another of our perennial venues. Another of Kimberly's Twitter buddies was in the audience, and afterward we went out to tea with her. She and her husband are RVers as well, and they also ride motorcycles. Later they both rode their bikes over to the Flying J to say howdy again as we were going through the lengthy process of taking showers in the RV, dumping the tanks and refilling. We had to go through the entire cycle twice, since there are currently four of us instead of just three.

April 23

It was 20 years ago today that we (Dennis and Kimberly) met at an audition in San Francisco. We both got the job, and the rest is hysteria. The director of the company was our friend Sue Ellen, whom we visited a couple of days ago, and we always like to remind her that she's ultimately responsible for all this.

Today we performed at the Fairfield Library, another place we've been to many times. Libby and her mom and sis came to the show, even though they've seen it before. And they witnessed the onstage collapse of our stool, an incident that we incorporated into the action so well that they thought it was planned. Very gratifying.

Also in the audience was one of Kimberly's Twitter buddies.

Twitter is a social networking/microblogging site that let's you "tweet" from anywhere in 140 characters or less. Check it out - we are "activated" if you want to follow us.

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