Mission #3 (Originally written June 17th)

Sculpture at Albany Bulb park. June 2, 2006.

I don't think I ever properly introduced this trip that has now reached its conclusion, other than mentioning that I bought airline tickets for it. Four of the Five Distinct Missions have now been completed, but I'll sleep easier if it's properly documented. The most recent mission was to show off California to Bree and have an adventure of it, and I think you'll approve of the execution.

On our last day in Berkeley we dined on Infinite Sushi at Edoko on University and indulged in gellato at the absolutely phenomenal Gelateria Naia. This establishment offers saffron gellato and thereby earns my eternal blessing.

A highlight here was meeting fg and one of his housemates for these above-mentioned culinary expeditions. fg somehow showed up, doubtlessly via a livejournal friend-of-a-friend connection, on my radar as he wrote of his wanders through Mongolia. He'll tell you he's traveled in Russia, but he's not talking about Moscow Russia, he's taking about Spans-Eleven-Timezones Russia. Having made it something like 19,000 of the 20,000 miles around the globe, he's settled, at least for the time being, in Oakland. I'm sure there will be adventures to follow.

The previous day we partied lightly at Casa Zimbabwe's rooftop speakeasy. My friend Billy kept us entertained with tales of urban exploration, physical space hacking (such as climbing the Wells Fargo Building, one of Berkeley's two skyscrapers), and other crazy capers. We visited Kingman co-op and elected to sleep on the roof. And so on.

But anyways, after our gellato, Saffron and otherwise, it was time to get on the road. Our things packed up, our backpacks loaded, suddenly we were mobile again, with ten days of freedom stretched out before us. We took the number fifty-one bus out of town to the Oakland embarcadero and boarded the San Joaquin Amtrak train with Yosemite National Park our intended destination.