Friday, October 19, 2012

Running from the law

We are parked on an industrial street in Redwood City, California (map), a few blocks from where we had been in Menlo Park.  While very quiet at night, this is a busy street by day, and would not be our first choice; however, we only needed one night and we did not want to stray much further from the bridge.

We had to move because our 72-hour clock ran out last night at our last spot in Menlo Park, just a quarter mile from where we had been at the beginning of the week.  Annoyingly, the MPPD left us a sticker a full day earlier saying we'd been there past the limit (we had not), and neither one of us had even seen it because they stuck it on the paint (also annoying) a good yard or so aft of the door.  I noticed it late in the afternoon, after we returned from our lunch date in Palo Alto, and even though we should have had until 10pm before our 72-hour clock ran out, we decided to move here before dinner rather than push our luck with the PD.


Last night is the first night in well over a week where we had no dinner plans, so moving was an unhurried affair.  With no dinner fixin's in the house, owing to the non-stop visit schedule, we ended up driving over to downtown Redwood City and eating at Vesta, an upscale pizza-and-tappas joint.  Uncharacteristically for October, it was still 80° out, and we dined al fresco on the sidewalk -- very pleasant.

Today we have another lunch date in Palo Alto, and then we will take the bus across the bridge to Fremont and the Elks lodge there -- my home lodge for some 15 years.  We really need to dump and fill tanks, and they have hookups and a dump station there, and it will position us well for tonight's dinner engagement, in Milpitas, as well as for tomorrow's excursion back up to the Walnut Creek area to visit with my cousin.

6 comments:

  1. You should go out to zotts for a burger while you are in the area...

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    1. To me, Zott's goes more with motorcycles than rental cars. And, frankly, the burgers aren't all that great -- I've had more of them there than I can remember. You really go there to share a pitcher of beer at a picnic table on the patio -- it's really more of a biergarten than a burger joint. Like Alice's Restaurant further up the hill, nobody really goes there for the food (although Zott's has better food than Alice's, IMO). It doesn't get the same crowd since they bulldozed the D.C. Power Lab (original home of SAIL) down the road, either.

      And for anyone wondering what the heck we are talking about, the real name of this place is the Alpine Inn, and it's been the Alpine Inn since I first started going there, circa 1983 (before the aforementioned lab closed). However, once upon a time a long time ago, it was called Rossotti's, which the locals shortened to just "Zott's", and the name has stuck ever since. AFAIK, the sign out front still says "Alpine Inn, formerly Rossotti's. Gordon Biersch could buy the place out, and we'd all still call it "Zott's."

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  2. Maybe it just my glasses, but the issuing officers name appears to be: Drone. Appropriate for parking officer type ;)

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    1. I think it is actually "Ordone," although his or her handwriting suggests a possible career alternative as a physician. No parking officers in this part of town -- this would be a sworn patrol officer. They came in pairs, because the similar sticker on the Jay Flight nearby, with the same date and time, was signed by officer Sepulveda.

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  3. You were parked just just down the road from where I spent much of my previous life (for about a year) as a marketing communications manager!

    So glad to have left the cubicle life far behind so long ago...

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  4. Did they impound the bus and put you folks in jail for a couple of weeks....?

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