I am taking a Physical Geography class at Laney College in Oakland. Our teacher is a quirky dude, about 60 years old or so and thoroughly immersed in his subject. It makes the class fun, but he is chronically late for class, often by a few hours.
Today we had a field trip up to Point Reyes National Seashore, in Marin County. Because of liability issues, students were responsible for providing their own transportation and I agreed to bus three of my classmates, plus one classmate’s wife, up to the Seashore today. It was an interesting day, with some great successes and a few failures. It started when I got down to Laney (a Community College in Oakland) at about eight or nine in the morning, expecting to meet four friends, take them up to Pt. Reyes and spend the afternoon looking at the tide pools. Things started to go badly when one of my passengers didn't show up. We waited for him, looked around the campus, and all that, and finally decided that his absence was his problem, not ours, and we beat it.
So we drove up the 580, across the San Rafael Bridge, and quickly got lost. We started up US HWY 101, but then realized our directions were bad and we were headed in the wrong direction. So we went back to a motel in Larkspur where we got better directions to Pt. Reyes. I was happy to see that the new directions took us through Samuel P Taylor State Park, which is named after a great-great grandfather of mine.
We arrived at Pt. Reyes late, and found a gang of our classmates, and no Teacher. Our classmates were pretty upset about having dragged their butts out to Pt. Reyes and then not having a teacher there. This field trip was supposed to be a two part field trip, the first part at Pt Reyes and the second down in the Tide Pools in Bolinas, and so most of the class decided to head on down to Bolinas, while my two friends and I decided to chill out at Pt Reyes for a little while. We thought the Prof would show up, so we just chilled in the Parking lot for a few hours - No instructor.
So then we decided that we would go down to Bolinas. So my friends and I drove down California Highway 1 to Bolinas. My cousin, who grew up in Marin County, had once told me that 1 is absolutely gorgeous, but I had never driven it until today. 1 is absolutely stunning, especially below Bolinas, which we drove on the way home. But I am getting a little ahead of myself here. We got a little lost, but we had a map and finally found our way to Bolinas. Again, there was no teacher, and this time, no students. By this time, we were hungry. I had brought my lunch and my friends had bought some food there in Bolinas. So we wandered out onto the beach at Bolinas. The field trip, as an organized thing, was dead. It was no longer the instructor’s field trip, it was our adventure. At this point it felt like a movie - here we were, three strangers on an adventure that none of us had bargained for. So we went out to the Beach at Bolinas, and ate lunch and wandered around and chitchatted about life as students and what we wanted to do when we finished school.
After lunch and about 90 minutes hanging out on the beach, we finally decided to head home. My companions wanted to backtrack the way we had come, but I pushed them to try to Highway 1 again, on the promise that I would not go into San Francisco, where the traffic was feared to be evil, but instead take a detour in Southern Marin and come home through Richmond. This led us past San Quentin State Prison, where we stopped to take a peek at some inmate artwork that was on display at a gift shop (who knew that a state prison had a gift shop?!)
At the end of our trip, one of my friends generously treated us to a dinner at Spenger’s Fish Grotto in Berkeley, a real treat!!
