Travel

The trouble with San Francisco is that there are way too many fabulous places to eat. Regardless of how much over-eating a person chooses to do, enjoying more than 3 meals a day may be the digestive limit. Just two days in which to eat in the city by the bay upped the ante for my family. Our weekend in San Francisco was to visit with our adult children. What a difference from those early years when only a small selection of beige foods would cross the little lips of our youngest. Now he’s 6’5”, so that early limited palate clearly didn’t stunt the kid’s growth. He and I plotted for months about where to eat, and at first we thought we’d go to one of the recent James Beard award winners, but all were booked four months in advance. How frustrating. But the depth of eating possibilities in the city and beyond left no time for sulking. Rock, paper, scissors, and plans were made.

On this perfect Saturday, we started the day at Tartine, the fabled bakery. A long line of hungry eaters surrounds Tartine every morning and evening, so we planned our arrival at the opening bell. Long lines in that neighborhood are pretty common because there’s such an abundance of good eating in so many places. If you are in the Castro/Mission area of San Francisco, just cruise the streets and jump into a line spinning out of one or another of the local food joints, and you’ll be well-fed.

On my first day in Paris, on our first tour around the Jardins Luxembourg, a charming Persian woman with bouncy curls and smiling eyes stopped me and my entourage of children and a dog for a chat. "The French drive me crazy," she pronounced. "But living in Paris will mean two things for you. You will become both more refined, and more humble." And so the adventure begins...

It turns out that there is heaven on earth.  And it lives in an inauspicious plastic saucer, covered in cling wrap.

This week’s cheese was a seemingly unassuming Saint Félicien.   This little number is made in the Dauphiné region of France, and it is soft and extra creamy.   We took our first bite over lunch with the girls, and at Twiggy Sanders’ suggestion, I was armed with a fresh baguette.   

The cheese starts out relatively contained, but by the third bite, the fresh cream had runneth over into the container.  We started to eagerly mop it up with pieces of bread, and within about ten minutes flat, the entire saucer had been wiped clean.

Olympia is a charming little city in the Pacific Northwest, set down on rolling hills surrounded by forests of Douglas-fir, bigleaf maple and red cedar – a pretty, speckled egg resting in a nest of twigs.

This is the old part – the far end of the Oregon Trail, settled on Native American land by Europeans in the 1850’s – where Leopold Schmidt founded the Olympia Brewing Company in nearby Tumwater Falls and sold his beer, if you recall, with the slogan, "it’s the water," which I’m surprised none of the hundreds of water bottlers has adopted now that Leopold’s beer business has folded.

This is Downtown Olympia, with its century-old buildings, its perfectly-proportioned Capitol, its tree-lined streets on which people drive politely and you can always find a place to park – often without a meter – near the still-family-run bookstore or café or bike shop you want to go to.

But that’s not where I wanted to go, or rather needed to go, to help my son move into an unfurnished apartment.  We needed to head over to the other part of Olympia and it is this part – which I imagine you’d find outside most other American towns of its size – that I’m still trying to figure out as the plane banks over Puget Sound taking me home.

My mother, Shannon, and I scurried down Little Clarendon Street, Oxford at around 10:15 at night.  We were starving and eager to sit down and talk.  My mom had steered us down this road because there are a number of good restaurants to choose from: French, Italian, Tapas, Indian.  I peered into each window and chose the least crowded of the bunch – the French one.  If left to me, I will always choose the emptiest because I find that the din of busy restaurants these days overwhelms any chance of having a decent conversation.  We hadn’t traveled all this way to explore new cuisine.  We had come to see my mom.

My birthmother just graduated from The Continuing Education Department at Oxford University, with a focus on regional history.  I couldn’t be more proud than to celebrate her continuing achievements, so Shannon and I flew to Oxford to watch her graduation ceremony that evening.

We pushed open the big red door of Café Rouge and walked through the bar into the dining room of the brasserie.  The room was big with dark oak floors and tables, burgundy velvet banquettes, and antiqued mirrors which hung from every wall.   We waited for a few minutes and then were shown to our table by a disinterested, lanky blonde waiter.  He carelessly danced around, making faces at another lanky blonde waiter working the other side of the room.  Menus were tossed onto our table, orders taken and we started to catch up.