A ridiculous confluence of events – Sonoma, GMA, Angel Island

By Jason

If this post is a bit disjointed, it’s because the past week or so has been a bit busy and we’ve bounced around from one thing to another like a pinball, inside a pinball machine, inside another giant pinball machine.

Last weekend was to be our big trip to Yosemite. We were planning on camping out with some of my coworkers and then doing some mild hiking around the valley while most of them attempted to scale Half Dome. This was going to be Athena’s first camping trip, so Ann spent the week preparing and packing and I spent the week convincing Ann that it wasn’t a crazy idea and that Curry Village is actually quite nice.

This was all planned out when we learned that Todd would be in San Francisco the same weekend. We worked out a plan to drive up to Sonoma on Thursday to meet up with him, then leave for Yosemite Friday right after work.

Then some of the corporate communications people at work told me some news outlets might be interested in doing a story on all the scams using Google’s name and logo… and by the way, Good Morning America will be here on Friday :)

Then Yosemite caught fire.

So on Thursday, we did go up to Sonoma to see Todd and meet Liz. Todd was actually having a bad reaction to some sunburn so we didn’t go on on wine tours, but Athena was her normal charming self and we had a nice visit.

I had to go in to work early that morning for practice interviews and give the correspondent some background over the phone during lunch, but that was okay.

On Friday I did the interview – it was about a half hour of taping but in the end they only used a few seconds. You can see the clip and read the news story and read more about the experience on my blog.

Later that day we found out that wild fires near Yosemite had closed the road to the west entrance and filled the valley with smoke. We had to cancel the trip, but Reid pulled together a last-minute day trip to Angel Island, just north east of San Francisco in the bay.

We carried Athena around with the baby carrier and stowed about a thousand pounds of baby stuff in another backpack. It pays to be prepared, though – Ann had bought a new thermos for the camping trip and it kept us supplied with hot water for milk all day, no problem.

We split off from the main group to avoid the steep trail and walked over to the Angel Island Immigration Station, where many Asian American immigrants were detained. It was a nice walk, though uncharacteristically hot.

The walls of the building have poetry carved in Chinese:

Athena absolutely loved taking the ferry to and from the island. Judging from her reaction, it was the greatest thing she had ever experienced in her 9 months on this earth.

Our fellow hikers included Mike, Beah, Dan, Nelson, Merry, Charlene, Reid, Kolina, Naoko from the Tokyo office, and Andrew from Seoul.

Few people know this but Nelson and Mike are professional catalog models:

The ferry back from Angel Island is amazingly inconvenient. We had to go to Tiburon, then Fishermans Wharf, and then finally back to the Ferry Building where we started our trip.

And here’s one last photo, Athena has learned how to drive:

Ann and I are somewhat exhausted.