Gracious hosts

Been kind of caught of with the dog the last few days and got sidetracked off other things, such as the recent vacation. For that matter, talking about stuff other than myself and Cathy. I will get around to that again eventually. I never really meant for this to be a purely personal blog. But I've never known exactly where something will go when I sit down to start writing. And I suspect I'm far from alone in that.

But it occurs to me that in my ramblings in the past week I never gave proper thanks on the blog to our gracious hosts Jaap and Charlotte. Oh, we thanked them enough when we were leaving, but I feel it's only proper to give them their due here as well.

My friends know I'm exceptionally wary of imposing on them while travelling. Without going into detail there was an incident about 10 years ago where I clearly overstayed my welcome. There were extenuating circumstances, but still. Ever since then, I've been worried that I'm imposing, no matter what reassurances I get to the contrary.

That's changed slowly. We stayed with Dups a couple of years ago and that went well. And during the trip to San Francisco we stayed with Jaap and Charlotte. And they were, as the title of the blog says, very gracious hosts. They put us up in their home, which we severely covet. Not that it's a huge mansion. Far from it. It's a nice, comfortable, one-storey house. But they've done it up to suit themselves. It's perhaps not exactly how I would design a house, but I suspect it's not far from it. Oh, and it was about a five minute walk from their house to a very nice, barely used beach.

But that's one of the things about California - they have so many beaches that it requires only minimum effort to find one that no one is using.

Along with putting us up, they gave us rides to the train station that took us into San Francisco (they live in a community called Half Moon Bay, about 30 minutes south of the city), the took us out to supper, gave us information and were excellent company. You could not ask for better hosts. Oh, and Jaap drove me into the city one day where we did a nice geek out, hitting a couple of comic book stores and perhaps one of the best record stories I've ever been to - Amoeba Record.

However, because we're gits sometimes, we actually forgot to get a picture of the two of them. Oooops.

Anyway, thanks one more time to them for everything. They both said to come back anytime. And, you know, we might just take them up on that one day.