So we took the in-laws to San Francisco. Ellen’s mom (75) and dad (82), Ellen’s sister and her family. There were nine of us all told, and somewhere between planning the thing and living it I stopped thinking of it as my trip and started thinking of it as theirs, which is probably how it should’ve been the whole time.
I’ll be straight, I planned it like a typical tourist. Golden Gate Bridge on Friday, Alcatraz Saturday, Yosemite National Park in the middle, Stanford University, then home Wednesday. That part I’m good at. What I wasn’t ready for was that almost none of the stuff I’ll actually remember was on that list. Consider it my crash course in travelling with ageing parents.
The ferry thing
This is the one that scared me.
We were on our way to Alcatraz and because of their age Ellen’s parents got pulled into pre-boarding. Which sounds like a nice thing. Get the older folks on ahead of the crowd, no shoving in line. Except the pre-board line put them on a different ferry than the rest of us and we didn’t clock it until they were already gone. So now you’ve got two 80 year old people on a boat out to an old prison in the middle of the bay and the rest of the family on a boat behind them, and no real way to know if they’d be standing there when we got off or not.
They were, for the record. Fine. But I did not enjoy that crossing.
Here’s what I took from it, because I’d never once thought about it before we went. If you’re travelling with older parents, don’t let them go anywhere alone, even when the system is trying to help them. Pre-boarding is meant as a kindness and it is one, right up until it separates them from the group at the exact moment somebody needs to be with them. Send somebody. Every time. The convenience is the part that split us up.
Allan
Funny thing is I spent the week braced to slow down for them and they kept making me look silly for it.
Allan, my father-in-law, is 82. On the Alcatraz day he did over 13,000 steps. I looked at the number twice because I didn’t believe it the first time. Thirteen thousand and San Fran is HILLY. He was still going when I was ready to sit down. I know guys my age and younger who don’t hit that.
I don’t know, it reset something for me. I’d gone in thinking I’d need to manage them, take it easy on them, watch the pace. What they wanted was to go at their own speed and their own speed was fine. Better than fine. There’s a lesson buried in there about not treating older people like they’re made of glass, but honestly Allan made the point better than I can by just walking me into the ground.
Getting around
Two rides stuck with me and they couldn’t have been further apart.
One was a Waymo. This company, which is owned by Alphabet (of Google fame), makes one of those cars with nobody driving it. It’s literally a robot taxi! I’ll admit it’s genuinely cool, the novelty is half the fun, and you can see how it’d work great in a city as long as you got the regular human drivers out of the way. The ride itself became a thing we did, not just how we got somewhere. Each Waymo has 5 LiDAR sensors which map out the entire area. We transitioned between Uber and Waymo. You really need to check each company’s pricing, because depending on where you are and where you’re going, one will generally be cheaper than the other. A nice thing about the Waymo is that you don’t have to tip 20%. God, I hate tipping…
There’s something I keep coming back to about putting Allan in that Waymo. The man was born in the early 1940s. When he was a boy the cutting edge of technology was the vacuum tube, radios that had to warm up before they’d say a word to you. And here he is, eighty-some years down the road, sitting in the back of a car with nobody in the front seat, a computer working the wheel and five sensors on the roof reading the whole street in real time. That’s not the kind of progress you measure in gadgets. He’s lived all the way from the vacuum tube to the self-driving car inside one life. I looked over at him in that seat and it kind of floored me. Whatever I think is coming in my years, he’s already watched the future turn up more than once.
The other one was the streetcar. Windows open, breeze coming through, quiet, hop on and off wherever. Somebody said “too bad we don’t live like that anymore” and that stuck with me for the rest of the day. It’s slow and quiet and that’s the whole point of it. All of us on there together going nowhere fast.
I keep coming back to those two rides sitting side by side. The future shows up as a car that drives itself and the thing that actually made everybody happy was a hundred-year-old streetcar with the windows down.
Don’t trust the storefront
This one kept happening the whole trip so I might as well group it.
On the first day, we had lunch down at Fisherman’s Wharf. The outside of the place was a dump, honestly. Looked like nothing. The food was some of the best we had. Sitting outside among the pigeons on cheap little plastic chairs with a plastic covered table, we literally had five star meals.
Then in Mariposa, the little town outside Yosemite, we stayed at the Monarch Inn. With two stars online, Ellen and I were genuinely concerned about what my sister-in-law had gotten us into. It turned out to be really nice, clean and comfortable. Another one where the rating told you exactly nothing.
And a heads up if you ever go out that way, small towns don’t put their hours in the window and if you don’t have a data plan you’re stuck. You genuinely can’t tell what’s open. I guess the locals just know. The one place we found open for breakfast was Jantz Cafe and Bakery, opens at 7:30, drip coffee only, but the scones were worth it. Angel, my sister-in-law, tracked down the actual good coffee at a place called Sticks, proper craft stuff you’d never guess was hiding in a town that size. Point being the good spots don’t advertise. You either know, or you travel with somebody who’ll go find it. Bring the data plan.
The guy who gets up at 1 AM
Last morning gave me the story I’ll probably tell people about first.
Ellen and I had to return the rental van we’d taken to Yosemite National Park. After dropping it off at Enterprise in Union Square at 7:30 AM, we were dying for a cup of decent coffee. We found this little place called Le Carousel Patisserie. The gentleman behind the counter, Nader, spoke with a beautiful French accent, very smooth, very polite. The pastries matched him. The Raspberry Bow, with homemade raspberry filling, was to die for. The pastry itself is what a croissant is supposed to taste like. I can still taste it 3 days later! We also had this flower-looking thing with a mango and pineapple dome on it and coconut on top that I almost didn’t want to eat because of how it looked.
Then Nader tells us the backstory. The place only opened maybe six months ago, started by a few French fellows, and the pastry chef, whoever he is, works out of South San Francisco and gets up at one in the morning every day to make that day’s pastries from scratch and has them there by 6, 6:30.
That’s the part I can’t let go of. You forget the pastry itself in a week. What you remember is that somebody got up at 1 AM to make it right. A handful of French guys six months into something they clearly love and you can taste it whether you know the story or not. I don’t know, that kind of thing gets me.
Le Carousel Patisserie · @Le.Carousel.Patisserie on Instagram
The danish
I need to own something here. I paid off my house as fast as possible. I don’t spend a dollar I don’t have to. My whole life has basically been an argument for the cheaper thing that does the same job, and I’ve been right most of the time.
Which is why it’s a little funny that the sharpest thing I figured out all week was me arguing the other side.
That last morning I took a picture. On one side the box of Le Carousel pastries, the ones the guy woke up at 1 AM for. On the other, the hotel’s shrink-wrapped danish, the kind with “Apple Danish, only 310 calories” printed right on the plastic. Both pastries, technically. Not the same thing at all.
And I just thought, sometimes it’s worth spending the extra money.
I don’t think that’s me going soft on the “cheap” thing. I think it’s the grown-up version of it. Being careful with money was never supposed to mean cheapest always wins and everything’s interchangeable. The whole point of the discipline was so you’d know when the good thing is actually worth paying for. The shrink-wrapped danish is the false economy. The pastry somebody made by hand at 1 AM is the reason I will spend more. It took me until my fifties and a bakery by an airport to say it plain but there it is.
Anyway
When I sat down to write this out I actually told George the last couple days “weren’t very lesson-y.” Big stuff was behind us, felt like the trip was just coasting to the end.
I was wrong about that. The lessons weren’t in the big stops at all. They were in the small stuff I nearly walked past.
The one that got me. After two straight days of me driving everybody all over the place, I got a quiet coffee with Ellen. She’s got her cup and she’s smiling at some pastry and we’re just there for a minute before the flight. That was it. That was the trip. Not Alcatraz, not the self-driving car, not the view off some lookout. Five quiet minutes with my wife after a week of hauling everyone around.
Which is the whole reason I want to write these down instead of forgetting them. You plan the itinerary, you sweat the ferry, you count the steps. And then the trip turns out to have been about a pastry somebody made by hand, and two old folks who were tougher than you were scared they’d be, and a coffee with your wife you almost didn’t notice.
Bucket lists across generations. I think the list was never really the point. The generations were.