Golden days, golden days. Well one of them at least. Saturday was the nicest day of the year so far. A full blue sky heralding the approaching Spring, and a comfortable warmth that reminded you more of childhood Summer days than anything else.

Yet I was struggling to enjoy it. I had so much to do, with my approaching move. I even had some office work that needed attention. Brett to the rescue, however. He called me in the afternoon and suggested we go hiking in the Berkeley Hills. I was surprised, as Brett isn't the most spontaneous guy in the world, but I jumped at the chance to break free from my responsibilities and play for the afternoon. So I smothered myself with sunscreen, pulled the top down on my jeep, and headed over the Bay Bridge.

I picked up Brett from his house in the flat (and boring :) section of Berkeley, and we climbed through the Campus, ogling pretty boys as we passed, and into the hills. Berkeley is a city of at least three different characters. Downtown is working-class, ugly, somewhat shoddy. The campus is better kept, and there's a pleasing contrast between the imposing grey stone buildings and the idiosyncratic and loopy Telepgraph Avenue scene. But as you rise into the hills, you find the beautiful part of Berkeley, with precarious winding streets, older, "settled in" houses, climbing wisteria, retired hippies, and views that swoop down to the Bay. Imagine an Italian hill town and you'd be thinking in the right direction.

I parked the car in a tiny, gravel parking lot, not without a little scare as I tried to back into a small spot on a slope and felt my wheels slipping and sliding suddenly towards the ditch! But we got out of that one safely, and started to hike up the trails.

I think the rest of our long hike can be described better by pictures...

Brett amazed me by knowing and recognizing pretty much every flower and tree. I guess he learned something at college after all! He studied forestry or tree-hugging or something.

I'm a lucky guy to have a friend like Brett

An attempt at an arty pic through a tiny hole in a mini stone wall.

A beautiful path through the hills

Poppies, and the Bay

Brett's been working out too :)

After our hike, we went to the Campus for a coffee. Campus is always what you expect from Berkeley - kooky, albeit with overtones of Gap these days. We thought this scene was hilarious. A band, with, what looked like a professor of "cultural studies" joining in on the bells, and a squad of four gormless high-school kids gawking wordlessly like extras from a slacker film.

At the end of a long, wonderful afternoon, and after our pit-stop on the Campus, we drove inland to Pleasant Hill, where I'd arranged to pick up about fifty cardboard boxes from a work colleague, so that I could use them in my move. This area is so different from what I'm used to. I'm tempted to wonder why a young couple would choose to live here. But I guess if you have kids, it makes some sense. I mean, it's beautiful, I guess, but it seems so remote and very, very white!

Suburbia California style

By coincidence, my colleague's house was a few blocks from the house where Brett grew up, and where his parents still live. So Brett persuaded me to drive over there and meet his family for the first time. I guess Brett and I have more in common than I thought, since his parents' style of interior decoration would have fitted in well with my own parents'! I had a long ten minutes of extremely polite conversation with Brett's mother, brother and father, before we escaped out for a fictitious dinner appointment (it was either that or stay for burgers!)

We ended the day with dinner al fresco at Pasta Pomodoro in the Rockridge area of Oakland, enjoying a delicious feeling of Summer evening languor and happy, tired legs.