Jets Game - Day minus 1

Well the last couple of days have been a bit of a culinary adventure.   We went to one of my favorite restaurants for dinner yesterday and I introduced my companions to soft tofu stew and bbq squid.   We also stopped at Carlos's Bakery (not to be confused with carlos bakery which is something completely different).  For those of you who do not follow the food channel apparently this is the bakery of the guy who does the show Cake Boss.   Good stuff there.   Today we ventured to Brighton Beach and ate at Rendazzo's clam bar.  Great steamers and wonderful red sauce on the lobster fra diavlo.   This bit of food overindulge required us to retire to the RV for the afternoon so we could watch the games and groan a bit in private.

Tonight we went to a restaurant called Takashi.   This restaurant serves Beef.  All the beef you want in all the ways you never knew you wanted it.   We had several unusual dishes.   BRAINS - well we all need a zombie fix now and then.   The first item served was calf brain cream with caviar, then some bone marrow and crawfish dumplings and steamed shank buns.  This was followed by testicargo, and yes it is exactly what it sounds like.   Then some stewed beef tendon and we were ready for the main course.  Skirt steak (ok not so unusual), beef belly and I had a plate of sweetbreads, beef heart, second stomach, first stomach and lives.   I can tell you the order presented is the order in which I enjoyed them.  I didn't like liver as a kid and I still don't.   But the rest was very good to great.  The skirt steak I was told was very good and I can testify that the beef belly was excellent as well.

Now all this going to places required driving.  People around here are nuts.  I can best describe how well they drive by relating some of the signs that have been put up to help control traffic.  There are the signs that say "Wait for green signal to go".  I am pretty sure that should have been part of their driving lessons, but apparently people here need to be reminded.  We certainly saw enough people go through red lights like they didn't exist.  There are also signs like "Take turns merging".  Ok, pretty sure that is how Merging is supposed to work.  Apparently without reminders they don't know that here.   Then there are the do not drive and/or park on shoulders and sidewalks (three different signs)   I always thought the nature of sidewalks was they were not part of the road.  Driving on them was restricted to the car chase sequences in action movies.  And then there is the Light Rail system.  Might be a good system, but is missing the Light part of the Light rail.  Like no warning lights, gates, swinging somethings, horns - nope nothing like that.  The trains just go on down the tracks and the cars go on down the streets and the streets cross the tracks and you hope your timing is good and you don't meet in the middle.  Had one train about 10 feet from our car and we pulled up on the track and there he was.  If I hadn't seen him and floored the gas we would have been run through.  Would have said it was my fault and I should have looked for the train, but come on - it is a blind corner and there are tracks across streets everywhere.  I would get rear ended by some car if I stopped before every track.

Now I am not saying everyone in New York and New Jersey is trying to kill me, I can't say that because I have yet to meet everyone in New York and New Jersey.   But I can say that when it comes to driving, I am more than willing to think muggers in the subways must be the safer option.

Tomorrow the game.  Packers lost today, Vikings lost today, and with our win tomorrow we go into a tie for the lead of the division with the Lions.  Next week we crush the Packers and .... well maybe I am getting ahead of myself.  One game at a time.  Tomorrow it is J E T S lose lose lose.

Leading up to the Jets Game

I have not had a chance to post anything the last few days.  We left San Francisco on Monday and have been pushing pretty hard to get to our campground just outside NY by today.  Actually we didn't quite make it and we will be getting in tomorrow morning - we are about 3 hours outside NY.   It has been quite the trip going coast to coast this week.  You can understand about how big and different this country is intellectually.  But until you drive up a set of mountains, across the wide open nothing of Wyoming, through the salt flats of Utah, across the miles and miles of corn fields in Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, across the hills in Pennsylvania and then the smaller mountains until you end up across the river from NY it does not really hit home.  Seeing them all go past in the last few days has been fantastic and just makes me want to do it again, but much slower and see everything I had to speed past in more detail.   The trip is just under 3000 miles across the country and that leaves room for just under 300 construction zones.  Well everything about travel isn't great, even in an RV.  

Tomorrow we will settle into our campground by the city.  It will give us a chance to check out the new stadium and do some off beat sightseeing.  More on that tomorrow and Sunday.

But for now - Go Bears - The Jets are ripe for a takedown.

GAME DAY 49ers

Today was a bit strange for a football day.   Football starts at 10:00 out here on the coast.  It threw off my whole timing for the day.   Anyway - game time was 5:30 and we knew we had a potential hour to hour and a half drive to get to the stadium.  We wanted to get there early so we could look around the new stadium and enjoy the club seats we had for the game, so we planned on leaving at noon.  That way we would get to the parking lot at about 1:30 or 2:00 and then to the stadium by 2:30 or 3:00.  The gates were set to open at 3:00 so I thought this would work.   Little did we count on the absolutely abysmal traffic controls and signage at the Levi Stadium.  

To start with as you are flying down the highway there is 1 small sign to let you know where you should go for each color parking pass.  This sign displays 2 lines so Red Lot 1 / Exit at Lawrence Drive, then Red Lot 2&3 / Exit at .... I don't know what it said because by then you have passed the sign.   There are Red, Blue, Green, and some other color lots and 1, 2 and 3 for each of them.  Unless you get incredibly lucky you will never be able to find out where to exit for your lot.   So we guessed and got off at the next exit.  Once you are on the streets, there are no signs telling you where to go until you are right at the lot.  This leads to a lot of people making left turns from the left lane, the center lane and the right lane.  All trying to get into one lane on the new road.  Traffic jams abound.  Traffic control officers are nowhere to be found.   Bottom line, we got into line for our lot at 12:30.   We made great time getting down to the stadium.  Then we sat in line until we finally entered the lot (a drive of .7 miles) at 3:45.  Yes that means it took over 3 hours to get into the lot.  At that point you get to hike to the actual stadium.  It is just under 1.5 miles from the blue 1 lot to the gate.  And blue lot 1 is not the farthest of the lots.  It is about in the middle.  Once you get into the stadium it is fairly nice.  I actually thought the Steelers stadium and the Eagles stadium were nicer than Levi Stadium.  Oh and that will be the last nice thing I ever say about the Eagles stadium or fans.

The interesting thing about Levi stadium is they don't have a club, they have 7 or 8 clubs.  And depending on where your seats are and if you have signed up for membership in a club and paid the fee, you get access to different clubs.  Of course your tickets don't tell you which club you have access to and the people there are not totally sure which club you have access to other than if you don't have access to the one they are in front of.   This creates a bit of confusion. 

Prices at the stadium are a bit more outrageous than most stadiums.  $5.75 for a small water, 8.50 for a small fries, $9 for a plate of 6 chicken wing pieces.  9.50 for a hot dog.  6.50 for a small soft drink, Gatorade or ice tea. $11.50 for a beer.  A bit pricy.

The fans are actually quite nice.  They welcomed us to the stadium with a little good natured ribbing on how the Bears were going to get killed, but that is to be expected.  No one was rude or made us feel uncomfortable.  So that is great.  We have found that to be the case most everywhere other than Philadelphia.  (See I said I was done saying anything nice about Eagles fans.)

Once the game is over comes the experience of leaving the stadium.  I can generally summarize my feelings by saying once you are in the stadium it is nice, but they are way short on direction signage.  Outside the stadium, they are short on everything except crowds.   It is my usual practice to wait about 15 minutes or so after the game to let the crowds die down a bit.  This did not prove to be long enough.  The exit from the stadium is great, several escalators bring you down to the ground level with minimal waiting.   Then you hit THE BLOCKAGE.  As 75% of the parking lots are to the west of the stadium as well as the light rail lines, most everyone exits to the west.  There is one bridge at the exit that is about as wide as the tunnel to get to the Waldren deck at Soldier field.  Except now you have 75% of the much larger crowd from the game all converging on the one bridge.  It took over 20 minutes to walk across the bridge one shuffling step at a time with all 40,000 of my new close friends.   By the way, if you want to get high, just decide to breath as you walk.  No problem at all, everyone is more than willing to share.  After that it is time to walk back to the car.  Now fortunately we did not take public transportation, because the person doing crowd control on the entrance to the light rail line indicated it was about a 2 hour wait to get to the platform and board a train.   

Once you make it to the lot you find out that every lot is exiting in the same direction to the same 2 streets, because that is the only way to get to highway 101 and highway 101 is about the only way out.  After all this stadium is not in downtown San Francisco, it is in Santa Clara and everyone needs to get back to somewhere near San Francisco to get home.  Imagine the Bears playing in Rockford as an example.  Most everyone is going to want to get on 90 back to the Chicago area.   Well that is the same situation here.  2 hours later we finally got to exit the lot (we were parked near the front of the lot, the lot was still over 3/4 full when we exited).  Another 45 minutes saw us getting to the entrance to the express way.  Then a short 35 miles and we were able to get back to our RV.   Piece of cake.  (Stale cake from sitting in the car so long, but cake nonetheless.)

The Bears Won.  All is good and on to the Jets.

Days before Game Day - Part 2

Today was a great day.  Sun was shining, the breeze was gently blowing, the wine was flowing.  Not much wrong with a day like that, but to make it even better everywhere we went we met Bears fans.  And I MEAN EVERYWHERE!  There were fans at the wineries, fans at the restaurant we went to for dinner, fans as we were walking down the street.  As our waiter put it - Bears Fans Represent!

We had the opportunity to check out a few of the wineries in Napa and there was one I would like to highlight.  We went to Razi and I can't begin to explain how great this winery was.  It is not a fancy winery or a huge one, but the owner was as friendly as can be and walked us through his wines, the process and all sorts of other information on the area.   He also happens to be a Bears fan but that was only a bonus.  Razi is one of the few wineries where they don't make the tasting process a profit maker.  While they ask that you call for an appointment for a tasting, they were more than happy when we just stopped by.  Fred sat us down in his tasting room and started pouring his wines and letting us know everything we could have wanted to know about them.  He kept pouring wines and if you looked like you enjoyed one of them particularly he would pour you more of it.  Overall a great experience, and he has some pretty good wines as well.  If you are in the area you should definitely check out Razi wines.

Dinner was at Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc.  For those who are not familiar with this restaurant it is the hight of restaurant efficiency and serves some pretty good food as well.  There is one menu each night.  You get what they are serving or you don't eat there.  The menu changes each day.  You do have a couple of options.  Sometimes they have an add on course you can select, you can order cocktails, you can order the wine pairing and they offer soft drinks, coffee and tea.  That is pretty much the whole deal.  The menu tonight was an Iceburg lettuce wedge salad with their house made thousand island dressing, heirloom tomatoes, olives and bacon.  By the way, the thousand island dressing is nothing like the stuff you used to get out of a bottle as a kid.  This was followed by Grilled New York sirloin with roast vegetables, polenta and a great reduced sauce.  The second item was catfish fish and chips.  The breading was great, but I can honestly say the F&C at Camelot the day before was better.  The cheese course was a Comte and then a Pecan Tassi.  Oh and everything was served with great bread from Boudin Bakery.  So just that would make it a very good meal, but the best part in my opinion was watching the efficiencies built into the way the restaurant operated and how that translated into superb service for the customer.

For those people who are not interested in dissecting how business run you can skip the next paragraph.

It starts with how they bring water to the table.  They have 2 taps for pouring water into carafes next to each other.  The server puts a carafe under each tap and pulls the handles to fill them.  Right next to the taps is the bread station with sliced pieces of bread and the baskets.  The server puts 5 or 6 pieces of bread in a basket along with a tub of butter and takes it and both carafes to the table, fills the customers glasses with one of them and leave the other at the table for the customer so they have a full carafe.  Elapsed time under 40 seconds to fill the water and bread and head for the table.  The bar is located in the center of the serving area right next to the path to and from the kitchen so there is no wasted effort for the servers to have to go to another area to get the drinks while the food may be waiting to be served on the other side of the restaurant.  Having a single set of items coming out of the kitchen obviously simplifies the ordering as well as the serving process and lets the servers concentrate on making sure the customers are fully taken care of.  Everything in the entire restaurant is done in the same efficient, but efficient aimed at taking care of the customer, way.  It is refreshing to see a business that does things well from a business as well as from a customer standpoint.

Tomorrow is the big day - GAME DAY!  We will be heading down to the stadium early and will give a full report on this new football location.  One thing we can report is that there is a LOT of discontent with the stadium being located in Santa Clara about 50 miles out of San Francisco.  We will let you know tomorrow if the new stadium lives up to the press.

Days before game day - Part 1

San Francisco is a great city.  The people are friendly (if a bit strange at times), the scenery is great,  the food choices are outstanding and who doesn't like listening to the roar of the waves crashing on the beach.   We were able to spend today just wandering down the coast highway after taking care of the business side of RVing (dumping tanks, shopping for groceries and the like).   Breakfast (well lunch) was at a great little British Pub we found in Pacifica.   Called the Camelot, the shop was opened in the late 60's by a couple from England and they have been serving great fish and chips ever since.  Well I can't testify that they have been great all along, but I can say with no lack of certainty that they are great today.   I have had the opportunity to sample many a fish and chips in London and the product being served at Camelot is better than most anything served back in the Jolly Old.   Combined with a large selection of draft beer including Guiness, Bass, Smithwicks and Shocktop, as well as a good selection of Ciders I find myself trying to find a time to fit a return visit in before we have to leave this coast.  

Well enough about Breakfast (lunch, must remember to say lunch if I had a beer with my meal).   We then went for a drive on the coast and found some great places to pull over and enjoy the view as well as to relax and listen to the sounds on the shore.  We did however find a couple of odd sights.  

The first odd sight was Jurustic park.  This was a large group of rust colored dinosaurs that were made from scrap metal.   The tallest of them was about a 13' tall T-Rex and he (or she) was surrounded by a good dozen of his friends and meals, ah prey - um well other dinosaurs in any event.  At this same location we were able to spot a carving of a Bear.   Now this was not just any Bear.  This 6' + tall Bear had a football and a cat that ate the "canary" grin.   In this case the Canary must have been a Green Bay player, because the remains of the meal, in this case the helmet, was sitting at our satisfied Bear's feet.  Now anyone who has walked through the tunnel from Soldier field towards the Walden deck and South lot areas knows that no matter who the Bears have played,  there is always a rousing chant of "Green Bay Sucks" that breaks out.   Apparently that spirt has come all the way west with us because in California, just off the coast road Green Bay's popularity is just as in evidence.  

Tonight we went to Scoma's.   This is a restaurant on the waterfront that serves the best, in my opinion, Cioppino in the area.  The food was great and the service wonderful as well.  If you are ever in the area I would give Scoma's my hearty recommendation as a good place for some seafood.   Now getting there is another story.

At 10:00 on a Friday night the traffic in San Fran is bumper to bumper.  We are going slower than a person can walk.  I know this because I was passed repeatedly by a young lady walking along in flip flops.  During the course of the mile and a half we drove, she walked and the last I saw of her was her turning onto another street about a block in front of us.  But all was good because we got to enjoy the very active night scene as we crawled along.  We also got to give a hard time to a Packer's fan we saw at one street corner.  Somehow he seemed surprised by the Coach chanting Green Bay Sucks out the car window.  Well serves him right for wearing a Green Bay jacket.   Between that encounter and a couple of more rude and rowdy, but good natured,  exchanges with some 49er fans we ended the night on a positive and enjoyable note.

Now if the Bears can only live up to all the promises we made in their name.   Well tomorrow is another day and I hear Napa calling so I will be signing off today.

GREEN BAY SUCKS!

2014 The Journey Contines

It is time once again for the Bears to venture out and battle to reestablish their reputation as the Monsters of the Midway.  While the opening salvo with the Bills did not quite turn out as we all could have hoped, Sunday is another day and we can look forward to their beating up on the 49ers.  

The Coach and I have loaded up the RV and set sail for San Francisco.   It is just over 2100 miles and we made the trip in just 3 days of driving.  After leaving Monday late afternoon we drove each day as long as we felt comfortable and stopped when we got tired.   Come Thursday late afternoon we arrived at our campground.  Total elapsed time 73 hours.  

So we have a couple of days to bum around San Fran.   We will go to a couple of our favorite restaurants,  wander the wharf,  head up to Napa and see the sights, and maybe taste a bit of wine and generally relax.  Maybe a cable car ride will be in order as well.    Then off to the stadium for the Game on Sunday.

Monday we will pack up and head for the East coast and the Jets game.   We have 7 days to make the trip, but we are shooting to get there in 5 days.   It is about 3000 miles, so it should be possible if traffic and the weather cooperate.  Net trip all told will be about 6000 miles by the time we get back to Chicago for the next home game.   A good start for the season.   We will see part of the country and with luck a couple of Bears wins.   Madden had it right.  RV and Football goes together like Football and Tailgating.  It is just right!

This year we will continue to sample the signature dish for each city or area.  For San Francisco it will be Cioppinno and probably some Sourdough bread.  

One final note and I will close out this opening entry for this year's blog.   On the way here we passed the Donner Pass state park.  It contains a memorial statue to the ill fated Donner party most of who's members died trying to get through to California.  As you may recall they became snowbound in the pass and ended up resorting to cannibalism in order to survive.  Well in some ones brilliant idea of a good marketing ploy you will see a couple of signs advertising the memorial and featured prominently on each of them is an enticement to come and dine at the Donner Monument Restaurant. Seriously people A Restaurant at the memorial to a group of people who embraced Cannibalism.   SO  WRONG!

GO BEARS!  We are so ready for some football!