to Marin

I didn't tell you what I did after leaving the Gravenstein Apple Fair a couple weeks ago, did I?

It was 2 pm, I wanted to rest up before heading home, and a perfect place to take a break would be a public library. Chairs. Air conditioning. Books.

I'm not GPS equipped, and I didn't have maps with me, but most cities have little directional signs on the streets directing you to the library. (As also the nearest hospital, etc.) But it took me four towns before I could find the library that way. The first two I saw no signs. In the third, there was a sign on the main street pointing straight ahead, and I drove slowly down a mile and a half to the end of the street, then turned around and came back. No sign of the library.

When I got home I checked a map, and discovered that to get to the library, I should have turned right at an intersection soon after the straight-ahead sign. But there was no turn-right to the library sign.

I visited the city's website to find out who to complain to, and found an online form to fill out trouble tickets. I filled it out. A few days later a city worker phoned me! But all he wanted to do was argue with me about exactly where the straight-ahead sign was located.

I said I'd go back and check again, but I couldn't do that for a couple of weeks. (By then my car was in the shop having the dents pounded out.)

Tuesday was my day to go back. But I wasn't going to drive all that way just to check a sign. So I made a day of it. I had lunch at a highly-regarded bbq joint I'd seen a review of. It was tucked in to an exceedingly yuppie mall. The meat was extremely good, the sauce less so. (The trend now is to have two sauces, mild and spicy. The spicy = mild + nasty.) I drove past Skywalker Ranch, or where it's supposed to be: I didn't see anything. I drove out to Bolinas, a wildly funky town on the coast where I'd never been before, and came back over Mount Tam. On the way out there, in the ranch country, I stopped at the farm store for a cheese factory. They make only French cheeses, brie and camembert, which are not my style, so I didn't get any cheese. There were other things to gobble in the store, though, including soft-serve chocolate ice cream from Straus Creamery, a nearby mfr whose pints are a feature of some of my regular grocers, and their chocolate is their highlight. Oh, that was good.

And I went to the missing library, and talked to the clerks on duty, and picked up a mail-in comment form addressed to the director, and I may fill it out in case the city guy doesn't return my call.