A Lady in London

I didn’t want to come home for Thanksgiving. For the past five years I have gotten used to being away. From St. Petersburg to London, I have enjoyed carefree Thanksgiving dinners and have largely avoided cooking. But this year my mother’s attempts to guilt trip me into coming home to Silicon Valley finally worked. I packed my bags and got ready for a California Thanksgiving with the family.

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One of my favorite things about traveling home to California is the abundance of outdoor activities on offer. From hikes in the Santa Cruz Mountains to walks in Northern California’s coastal regions, from big wave surfing at Mavericks to kite surfing in San Francisco Bay, there is no shortage of things to do.

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California doesn’t have much history. It didn’t become a state until 1850, and not many people were around before the Gold Rush in 1849. Compared to London, where there are actual Roman ruins in the city center, my state looks pretty pathetic. But there are a few places that have more history than most, and one of them is the coastal town of Pescadero, California.

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One of my favorite things to do when I travel to San Francisco is to go wine tasting. Most of my recent tasting trips have been to Russian River, which is famous for its Pinot Noirs. Last week, however, I decided to venture a bit more north to go wine tasting in Sonoma’s Dry Creek Valley.

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The best thing about being from San Francisco is that no matter where I travel, I always have an excuse to return to one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

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What do you get when you mix one part gorgeous weather, one part excellent fresh food, one part world-class wine, and one part home? You get October in San Francisco.

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After my day of Disneyland fun on Friday, I was ready for some grown-up entertainment. This started at my hotel for the evening, the W Hollywood. A drink at the open-air bar turned into a tequila-tasting session when the guy next to me turned out to be a rep for a high-end tequila brand. This was followed by dinner with my brother and his wife, who kindly came up from San Diego to have dinner with me at a Mexican restaurant nearby. This, of course, involved more tequila in the form of margaritas. By the end of the evening I was pleasantly in grown-up fun mode.

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My last trip to Disneyland was eight years ago. I don’t get to the Los Angeles area very often, and when I do I usually don’t have time to spare. But on Friday I found myself in Anaheim with one day to dedicate to the happiest place on earth.

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Every six months or so I find an excuse to travel back to San Francisco. Sometimes the excuse is work, sometimes it’s family or friends, sometimes it’s holidays, and sometimes it’s something that brings together any number of those elements.

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I grew up in Silicon Valley. Intel, Cisco, and Oracle were household names in my town not just because everyone used their products, but because everyone’s parents were employed by them. As a kid I didn’t realize how unique my home was; I thought everyone’s parents—except for mine, of course—became paper millionaires overnight and every household had at least three computers by 1986. And while I was stuck driving a 1992 Dodge Caravan to school every morning, most of my classmates were embarrassed that their BMWs were only 3 series. It was, as we came to call it, a bubble.

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I’m at my mother’s house, where the speed of her Internet connection is about as fast as the speed of her car on the highway. That is to say, very slow. (I have to poke fun at my dear mother in hopes that she gets a new computer before I’m back in CA next!) As such, I’m going to keep this short for now and add more later.

Last weekend took me to Los Angeles, where I visited my cousin, who just had a baby on April 1. Needless to say, she was the cutest baby girl in the whole world.

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On Monday I started a new job in London. On Tuesday I hopped on a plane to travel to San Francisco for three weeks of job training at company headquarters. Ironically, the company I’m working for is headquartered in Silicon Valley about three blocks away from my high school. My life has a funny way of bringing me back to California.

So far I have spent the entire week in the Valley, which is something I haven’t done since college. It’s strange to be back in the area where I grew up. After living in London for a year and a half, I’m seeing things from a completely new perspective.

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It’s been nine months since I was last in San Francisco. That’s the longest I’ve ever been away from the City by the Bay.

While I’ve done my fair share of traveling in the interim, there’s nothing quite like landing at SFO. That’s not least because the runway goes right out into the water and I always feel like the 747 is going to magically grow pontoons and glide right into the bay. But more than that, I love landing at SFO because it’s home. The golden hills in the distance, the beautiful and highly underrated Bay Bridge to the east, and the city skyline all start to pull at my heart, reminding me that all this time I had left it in San Francisco.

As the plane descends, I realize that I even miss the ugly “South San Francisco the Industrial City” sign that’s so big it can be seen from ten thousand feet up. And the B of A building, where I spent two long years chained to a desk on the 44th floor. And the Port of Oakland, that ugly mass of buildings on the other side of the bay that makes driving across the Bay Bridge less inspiring than driving across its International Orange rival to the north. It’s good to be home.

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Every year on my birthday my aunt and uncle send me a card. This year they sent one with a black and white photograph of rolling hills dotted with giant oak trees. Without having to read the description, I knew that the picture was of California. It made me homesick.

Being back in California this week made me want to see some of that beautiful land outside of San Francisco. Yesterday my boyfriend and I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and headed up to wine country to take in the scenery and taste some of our state’s famous Pinot Noirs.

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This week’s adventure took me home to California, and I couldn’t have picked a better time to visit. The weather was hitting record highs in San Francisco just as the London heat wave succumbed to the London rain. As if that weren’t reason enough to be excited, there were two special events in the city over the weekend: Oyster Fest and Bay to Breakers. The latter is my boyfriend’s favorite holiday (“it’s like Christmas and New Year’s combined,” he says), so I knew I was in for a good time.

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