A golden birthday

I have started this new tradition of skipping work (and getting my husband to skip work) on my actual birthday instead of waiting, as a more reasonable person might do, until a more convenient time to celebrate like a weekend. My husband has been very obliging on this front, joining me in a walk from the SF Ferry Plaza to Sausalito last year and a little jaunt out to Angel Island this year. The other part of the tradition is to do something I've never done before, and Angel Island has just been out there, taunting me all these years I've lived here and never had the gumption to make the trip. We've tried to camp there about a dozen different times and always been thwarted because the campsites fill up like a year in advance and who plans that far ahead? But I think a spur of the moment day trip is the perfect way to experience La Isla de los Angeles.

We drove out to Tiburon, land of extremely expensive parking, to take the comically overpriced (for a ten-minute) ferry ride, but didn't let that stop us because it's a birthday and birthdays are no time to get hung up on details. We had stopped at Market Hall first to provision ourselves with roast chicken apple salad, feta-sundried-tomato orzo, some stinky cheeses and brought a bonny doon wine along to round it out. We had our picnic atop the first hill that we climbed, and then continued the ascent up to Mt. Livermore, which boasts a 360 degree view of the San Francisco bay. Since we'd started on the Tiburon side of the island, we didn't get our view of the Golden Gate (which I felt was important, it being my Golden Birthday) until the very peak, which made it all the more climactic. Literally. (Ha!) Jack just loved the hike, and let us know it by taking the biggest dook he has taken to date, right there on the peak. As we were traveling light, we had only brought disposables, and the disposables we had bought are just terrible-- never buy them, tushies brand, they're worse than no diapers at all I think, because they give you the illusion of being protected. So that was an exciting mess to clean up as the wind whipped around us, but Jack seemed to be having a grand time. And the bag I had brought was holy, in fact there was very little bag to it at all (I guess you should check these things before you go), so Danny wrapped the whole package up in another diaper, which made it look like a little burrito. A poo-burrito. Which made us laugh because that was one of the word-verification things my mom or Alison got stuck with to make a comment once. Pubarito. I have a very prescient spam-filter.

Back at Tiburon, we stopped for gelato, because birthday ice cream is also a tradition. And then got back to Oakland, where a babysitter met us so we could go out to dinner at our favorite small-plates restaurant A Cote. That turned out to be kind of a disaster (Jack is apparently not ready to be left alone at night yet), but we did get a good hour and a half of excellent husband-wife time with greek wines and belgian beers and all manners of gourmet cuisine like pancetta-wrapped quail and sausage-stuffed calamari. So that was nice. A perfect birthday. Not bad for a Wednesday.