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Tue, 19 Jul 2005

A summer picnic

I spent Sunday with friends from The Well, which held its annual picnic. It's been 101-102F the last few days out where I live in Pleasanton, so I was really looking forward to cooling down at the site, at Fort Mason in San Francisco, a secluded (well, sort of) clearing on a bluff above Aquatic Park. The picnic area is called Black Point Battery and is reservable for weddings and other events. It's in kind of a backwoods part of Fort Mason, behind the Youth Hostel and next to an old battery and stores (there's at least one preserved cannon there). It appears to be completely private, but as we discovered, even though it's in the middle of nowhere, a public path runs through it, connecting a steep stairway from Aquatic Park to a smaller stairway to the upper battery and Hostel. So every time people came up, we looked them over, trying to decide who they might be (a lot of people who come to Well events have only met online) before we realized they were not coming to the picnic.

Lots of people brought lots of tasty food, including some spicy smoked pork ribs (from Scott, the host of the HotLuck), marinated lamb kebabs, some ginger-fried chicken, curried plaintains, peach spice cake, homemade lavender lemonade, various breads and sweets, and I contributed a meatosaurus, which everyone here knows is a marinated beef tri-tip. This one was marinated in bourbon and spices. Here is the meatosaurus fresh from the grill:

It was fun to wander around in a part of Fort Mason I'd never visited. (If you do this, be careful: many areas are posted for poison oak.) And from the top of Black Point there was a great view of Aquatic Park and shipping traffic, and the dozens of ferries, and even the square-rigged Balclutha, an 1887 three-masted sailing ship moored nearby as part of San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park. And we watched as a group of Segway-riding tourists headed out to the end of the end of the pier. We could see the fog in the distance, but it stayed away and it was pretty warm and very sunny by San Francisco standards. By contrast, I returned home and found it still 93 degrees.

Posted at 15:54 | permanent link

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