Category Archives: Home & Family

We camped last week at the
Lair of the Golden Bear U.C. Berkeley alumni family camp. Most years, we
hang out in the art grove, at the pool, and in the creek. This year, we tried
something new: day hikes.

My brother Pete, my husband John, our two teens, Jessi and Paul, plus J.R. (borrowed teen),
and I joined ten other hikers at 7:30 a.m. in the Camp Blue dining hall to make sandwiches
and get directions. We drove out of camp to Pinecrest Lake
to start. We walked half way around the lake and then started to climb. There has
been a great deal of water in the Sierras this year so the mosquitos were out in
large numbers. From the lake at 5,600 feet above sealevel, we climbed at least another
thousand feet over granite and through bay laurels to Cleo’s Baths.

The water at Cleo’s Baths is very cold and very deep this year so there many people
jumped from the
cliffs into the pools. They came up gasping and delighted and ready to climb up
again. There are great basins and holes wallowed out of the granite from the rush
of snowmelt causing the boulders inside to spin and grind. Some are full of water and
others are empty. J.R. crawled into a deep hole and lay down on a warm boulder to take
lots of pictures. Paul kept looking for higher cliffs to jump from. Jessie and I sat
on the warm granite and talked then played a game of Set with the little kids. We hiked down after lunch
very happy and covered with bug bites.

After a day of rest, we were ready to hike to Natural Bridges. Again starting at
7:30 a.m., this hike required an
hour’s drive down through Twain Harte, MiWuk, Sonora, and Columbia. The Camp Blue hike
leaders took the steep fast trail down with breakfast in their packs while the rest
of us walked down the switchback trail through poison oak, blackberries, scrub oak,
manzanita, and grass to the creek.

After breakfast, we got ready to swim. The highlight of Natural Bridges is a long
high cave with the creek running through it. We brought black inner tubes to float on.
The first part of the cave is flat about ten feet over the water, at least forty feet wide
in all directions with water dripping, showering, or cascading down from the ceiling.
From there,
we floated into two high chambers with amazing yellow and brown and white
stalactites and limestone formations. The final area opens onto a hillside where the
creek enters the cave and there are warm granite hillocks to dry off on. We saw
banana slugs and a large yellow brown crawdad and lots of minnows. I was barefoot. I
wish I had worn my Tevas so that I could have done more climbing.

Jessi and I outlasted everyone because we took so long watching the crawdad creep from
one granite basin to another. We got to float alone back through the caves.
It grew very quiet and Jessi started singing opera. Hearing her lovely voice and enjoying
her playing with the resonance was a profound delight.

We drove back to the Lair after stopping to visit and have lunch at the Columbia Historic Park. What a great day!

Tomorrow morning, we are off for a week at family camp. We have been camping
at the
Lair of the Golden Bear (U.C. Berkeley’s family camp) every August for 13 years.
The Lair is essentially a little town (3 adjacent camps of over 300 people each open for 12
weeks each summer) that exists for a week a year. The reenrollment numbers are
overwhelming and there are families who have been coming every year since the Lair
opened in 1945.

About February every year, the kids start talking about the Lair and what they plan
to do this year. They save their messed up t-shirts for tie dying, they discuss
what they will do for the talent show, and there are talks on whether we
will drive home through Carson City, Nevada (with a visit to the Nevada State Railroad Museum and nearby Virginia
City) or through the California Gold Country.

From my point of view, camping, construction, and dogs are what justify owning an
SUV. Ours will be absolutely full by noon tomorrow with 6 passengers (my mother, my husband, and me plus three teenagers, one of them borrowed) plus sleeping bags, clothes, boots, books, guitar, art supplies, and all the other stuff needed for a week in a tent. We will meet my brother and his family and their similarly burdened SUV and have a grand week getting filthy, walking in the creek, dancing to Disco Bingo, and enjoying each other’s company.

My husband John and I took a few days off last week to take one of the
Top Ten Train Rides
in the world: across Canada on VIA Rail‘s “Canadian”.
This train goes back and forth between Vancouver and Toronto through some of the most
beautiful mountains and countryside in the world.

We started off on Friday, 29 July with a complete disaster: a frustrating and pointless round trip flight to Phoenix, AZ. It turned out that our connecting carrier, Air Canada (flying for United Airlines), decided to hold an end-of-month strike. That is, they left their flights on the computers but did not send any airplanes to move passengers. It is not clear why the San Francisco United staff did not tell us this instead of confirming the connecting flight at the Premier desk. Grump!

The United Premier desk in Phoenix helped us to reschedule everything since we could not get to Toronto. Instead of flying to Toronto to take the train to Vancouver, we reversed direction to take the train from Vancouver to Toronto. We ended up staying over night at the Vancouver airport Fairmont (actually inside the airport building) and spending a few hours in Vancouver before boarding the train. We checked our bags at Vancouver’s Union Station then walked a short way to board the
Downtown Historic Railway to Granville Island. From Granville Island, we took the False Creek ferry to see the ship St. Roch at the Vancouver Maritime Museum. The St. Roch crossed the icy Northwest Passage twice during World War II and now lives in its own building on the waterfront. It is one of my favorite spots in Vancouver.

John and I had our own sleeping compartment for three nights and four days aboard the Canadian’s Thompson Manor car. It came with 3 meals a day (everything was wonderful and was made from scratch on the train except the baked goods), plus access to the four dome cars and the lounge car. The staff were helpful and supportive; each car has its porter plus the dining car and lounge car staff. We sat with a number of different charming couples at meals. Most of them were retired (from South Africa, Australia, and America) but there were a few families with young children.

We were able to get out and walk a bit at some stops. The longest stop was for over an hour at Jasper high up in the mountains but we got a good walk in at Winnipeg too. Jasper looks like any ski and tourist town but the surrounding peaks are barren and spectacular. We were blown out of town by a rain and dust storm. Winnipeg was hot but had a lovely garden walkway from the station to a cantilever bridge over their muddy river.

John and I read lots of books and magazines, took many pictures and naps, and had a delightful time all around. After we got in (only 3 hours late), we stayed at Toronto’s Royal York Fairmont across the street from the station. Next morning, we flew home to San Francisco much relaxed.

On Tuesday, we rented a trailer and picked up our terra cotta warriors in the warehouse
in Oakland. There was the usual frustrating back and forth and discussions with middlemen.
We ended up paying $270 cash in addition to the trailer rental in addition to the purchase
and shipping price. $160 for the customs middlemen and $110 for the warehouse middlemen. The total cost was still much less than buying them here in the US. The warehouse had a funny sign
on the cashier window, something like: “If you are grouchy, irritable, or just plain mean,
there will be an additional $25 charge.” I told the lady I wanted one of those signs.

We picked up our son Paul at summer school in Palo Alto, drove an hour north and picked up my mother’s helper Sean in San Francisco, drove for another hour and picked up two terra cotta archers in three hundred thirty pound
wooden crates in Oakland. We left one archer in San Francisco with my mother (after John and
Sean and I pushed and pulled the crate up two flights of front steps and through the house and down the deck steps to the back garden). My mother and Sean unpacked her archer and she
seems very happy. The black finished archer is now kneeling in the dirt under a
rhododendron bush. It took about 6 hours round trip.

Our own archer is in our back yard in San Jose. He is currently kneeling on 50 pounds of
white sand surrounded by red bark chips in a corner between our river wall and the side
back fence. He will eventually have a wooden shed built over him. Like the ancient terra
cotta warriors, his head is separate from his body
and there is space for water to get in. He was packed in the crate with his head
wrapped in shredded paper under his butt. I don’t want him to fill up with water and leaves,
so we will build a shed over him before the rain starts in autumn. I am looking at Chinese garden building designs now. We are discussing what our archer should be named. I am
reading the Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian and will probably find
the name in there.

Jessica is at Westminster Choir College for
two weeks. She seems very happy from her emails and phone calls. She wrote “we had a
brief rainstorm today, and i swear that i could chew on the air! the
humidity is still fun, and the bugs here are waaaaaaay more
interesting than at home. fireflies rock!”

Her brother Paul is very lonely without her so we are taking him on a trip to the
Monterey Bay Aquarium on
Sunday. He will take a SCUBA lesson on Monday in the tide pool. John and I are both
enthusiastic divers and we are looking forward to a family dive vacation.

It is very hot in the Bay Area this week and all the new plants need lots of water.
Paul and I planted the dirt strip along the front of the garage with 5

nandina (heavenly bamboo) and a large garishly colorful

Amazon Queen hibuscus which is already blooming and seems very happy.

My husband John and I took a joint
three week business trip to China in April and May
this year. We went to the Sun China Engineering and Research Institute on
the campus of Tsinghua University in Beijing. I was there to recruit participants
for the SEED Engineering mentoring program and John was there to talk with the
Engineering staff about Sun’s ARCs (Architectural Review Committees).

On one of the weekends, we flew to Xian to see the terra cotta warriors.
We made the mistake of going during the Chinese Labor holiday so it was
very very crowded. The archaeological site is an hour’s drive from the city of
Xian. Xian has some lovely old buildings and a big city wall. The night before
we went to see the site, we walked through the hot streets of Xian.
The city park was full of teens and little kids roller skating. The
Science and Technology museum was closed but we could see painted figures on the
windows: a local version of
NASA’s Pioneer space plaque. The differences were that the figures on the
window in Xian wore underwear and were Chinese in facial feature.

Outside of the city, the countryside has scattered brick houses and walls with
many neat piles of sticks, tiles, and bricks around. Some of the walls and
shacks are dry-laid brick, others use mortar. There are tiny towns with small fruit
tree orchards and grain fields between. Brick outhouses stand between the road and
the homes. All the space is thoroughly used with old and new jumbled together.
You can see the stacks of what looks like a nuclear power plant past the farms
and muledrawn cart and bicycles on the road. As we drove closer to the Qin Army Vaults,
there were factories, some with rows of terra cotta warriors for sale in front.

We spent about three hours visiting the 2000-year-old
tomb itself. We mostly had to squeeze around the tours because the tour guides
would take up a position in front of their group at the rail over the pit and talk
for a very very long time. This meant that no one else could see what was below.
There are four buildings: 3 covered pits and one museum. Visitors get from one to
another using a credit-card-like ticket (from Xian Typical Brother Industries Co., Ltd.).
The pit earth is yellow brown and seeing the clay faces and bodies standing or lying on
top in their orderly rows is awesome. The bodies are strangely perportioned: the
trunks seem too long and the legs too short on the men. The horses have full size heads
and 3/4 size bodies and no tails. On the warriors, there are slight facial differences
from man to man, particularly when comparing the rarer figures and officers.

The museum room displaying the two small bronze chariots was absolutely packed with
people around the central glass cases but as usual in China everyone
seemed calm and good tempered. There was little elbowing and grouching. Kids were
protected from the crowd and everyone looked to be enjoying themselves even in the hot airless crush. Most of the tourists at the site seemed to be Chinese nationals rather
than foreign tourists. It was like visiting Washington DC where Americans go to be
proud of their heritage rather than just gawk at the sights.

John and I knew before the trip that we wanted to buy a full-size terra cotta warrior
copy while we were in China. I have wanted one for my garden ever since my Mother
visited China for the first time ten years ago. We had gone shopping at http://www.terracottawarriors.com/
so we knew what was available in the USA. Bargaining in China seems as much
interactive theater as
commerce. It took four hours at two different factories to make a deal everyone
liked. We tore up two sets of contracts along the way as part of the discussions
of what, where, how much, and how to pay. We had some advantage because the
http://www.terracottawarriors.com/
web site is blocked from viewing in China so the Xian salesmen did not know their
competition’s prices. After very hard bargaining, we bought two figures in dark
grey clay – like this original:

kneeling archer. One archer is for us and the other for my parents.

Last week, I got email from the Xian shipping company that two boxes are coming
in. Our warriors are in Los Angeles now, headed for Oakland, California. We will
borrow a truck and some hefty friends to pick them up when they arrive.