The delta

Christa, Tom , Chloe and I headed up to the Delta. They dropped me off at Sherman Island so that I could kiteboard while they toured around for a while. I hadn't been to Sherman before, despite it being one of the premier places to kiteboard in Northern California. I wasn't disappointed: strong, consistent wind, non salty water, and a pretty relaxed atmosphere. The launch is pretty small, but I was there early enough that there weren't very many people around. It was a lot of fun, and I'll hopefully have more chances to head up there this season.

Chloe and the crew very nicely came back to pick me up, and we headed out towards Locke. Along the way, we had lunch in Isleton.


There was an outdoor patio with live singing and the server looked like your grandmother, except that she had lot's of piercings. It was a little uncanny, actually and reminded me of that scene in "Death in Venice" when Aschenbach sees the old man on the vaporetto. The food itself was nothing special -- very fried non locally sourced fish and meat. But let me get back to the music, because that was really the most memorable part.

The main singer was pretty good, but the volume of the sound got to be a little painful by the end. Although he had impressive stamina and belted out song after song while we basked in high cholesterol goodness, he took a break after a while and had one of his buddies come up and sing. His friend's name was "Big John", was well over six feet tall and had a military buzz cut. Basically it looked like he just stepped off of PT109. In any case, while he could hit the lower notes admirably well, things didn't turn out so well when he sang solo. It sort of reminded me of that scene in Young Frankenstein when Gene Wilder dresses Peter Boyle up in a Tux and has him sing "Putting on the Ritz" -- "POOOIN UNNNN HUUUU RIIIIIIITZ".

From Isleton, we headed up to Locke, which was the coolest part of the trip. I'll rely on my trusty friend Wikipedia for the background on this small town. It really is a strange and cool place.




I talked to some local guys who said that all the beautiful pear trees (which were in bloom) probably would be pulled out in the next ten years because there is no market for them anymore. Additionally, whatever small market there is is saturated with Chilean pears rather than local pears. After visiting the museum, which had previously been a gambling parlor, we headed over to the schoolhouse. The schoolhouse, which had amazing pictures of the Chinese community. I thought this one was kind of entertaining though:

There were all kinds of fancy motorcycles and two beautiful Alfas in town

After Locke, we headed back to Berkeley, where Kenji cooked "Spaghetti a la Kenji"