“Since you will be coming in while we are out of the house, here it the drill. The key will be under the mat (I’m really not kidding.) Your bathroom is the first door on left in the front hall. Your bedroom is at the end of the back hall, through the kitchen. Your password for the in house wifi is on the desk. Welcome.)
Barliman Butterbur was the master of a hostel, named the Prancing Pony, in Bree. (If you don’t know where Bree is, please apply yourself to a map of Middle Earth. It is a boarder town, just out of the Shire,) Our house here in Adams Point, Oakland is named for that worthy establishment. But none our windows are round.
Now let’s get this straight. I started the Prancing Pony for the money. Taking in paying guests kept our heads above water in some pretty bad times. I didn’t know what I was doing, keeping the room clean and the beds properly dressed. (Y’all know I’ve never been a doting house keeper.) Once I started having guests, there was dust everywhere, there were spider webs in abundance and who is going to wash those windows? Leaving our bedroom door ajar in the heat of Fall can be problematical.( We still need to put cat doors in three access points.) But with time and well placed criticism, we slowly pulled ourselves together and got in the groove of looking after people.
B & B means bed and breakfast. And I really do offer breakfast, it says so on my page. All I need to know is what a guest might want. But nobody tells me, nobody asks. They just wander through the kitchen on their morning way to the loo. On their way back I ask if they want tea or coffee. Our most recent guests were from South of the border, from Bogota and Mexico City. I do not like coffee but I know how to make it. I’ve been concocting the elixir vitae almost 28 years, for the middle son of the Star of Havana. If you can’t see through it, it’s almost strong enough. My guests like their coffee black.
And then there is the question of water. Many of our guests arrive with water bottles, mostly plastic, and I offer them glasses of water. When they see me open the tap, they are taken aback. I’m from the Pasadena area and we call that water “Pasadena crude.” But the water here in the Bay Area is simply wonderful. On the East Bay side, it comes from the Mokelumne River, which is fed by the snow in the Sierras. San Francisco and the Peninsula get their water from Hetch-Hetchy reservoir, which is fed by the snow in the Sierras. So yeah, our water is really tasty. The Germans think it has too much chlorine. They can be hard to please.
One of our earliest guests were a lovely young couple on the last leg of a very long honeymoon, all over South East Asia. She was graceful and tall as a young linden tree. He was taller, 6’4’’, and when he saw that their bed was a king, he just fell on it with a small yelp of joy. The young husband had been folding his long Finnish frame into beds designed for much smaller people. So far, these folks are why we have a pin in Helsinki on the map of Europe. In our front hall, between the guest bath and the kitchen, are the maps. On one side are the National Geographic maps of the United States and The World. On tuther side is the Michelin map of Europe. On the top shelf of the cookbook library is a pretty crystal bowl. The bowl holds pins with round colored tips. When guests come to the Prancing Pony, they are offered a pin from the bowl and asked to place the pin in one of the maps. I ask them to put the pin in either their current place of residence or the place that they come from. Just recently a guest, looking at the sea of pins in the L A area, chose to put her pin in the Philippines, her mom is from there. Two sweet girls were here from Moscow. One of them was from Sakhalin Island. I’m very proud of that pin. And then there is the small but mighty nation of the Netherlands. There are so many pins between Utrecht and Amsterdam that there isn’t any more room. Is there a trail of bread crumbs from these two great cities to the Prancing Pony? The Dutch love to travel.
There are the places with no pins at all. I’ve only got one in the entire continent of Africa. And let’s talk about Tornado Alley. Idaho, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas where the hell are you? Come to the Bay Area, come to Oakland and stay at the Prancing Pony, you will have a wonderful time. Oh and speaking of time, we need to talk. My darling guests come from all over the world and many of the dears can’t read a map. They look at a map of my great state and say to themselves “Hey, there is Yosemite, we can get there and back in a day.” Sure you can sweetheart, you will spend 4 & 1/2 hours getting to the Groveland Gate and then 45 minutes to get to the Valley Floor. It just looks close but it ain’t. The lines you see on the maps are not freeways, they are highways. The 120 is two lanes in each direction, sometimes. When you go up the New Priest Road into Groveland, it is really circuitous and takes about 25 minutes. I am not being fair to those who do not know this state. It is a Tardis, much bigger on the inside than on the outside. And the distances are so much longer and higher and slower to travel than they look.
So they come to my house. They come with international sized luggage all the way from SFO to start a full tour of the Southwest. They come with overnight backpacks to enjoy a concert at the Fox or Paramount. They come for music festivals and to work at Kaiser. Sometimes they check themselves in, sometimes they come in late, just as long as they come. Because I love to look after them and am having a wonderful time.
Barliman Butterbur was the master of a hostel, named the Prancing Pony, in Bree. (If you don’t know where Bree is, please apply yourself to a map of Middle Earth. It is a boarder town, just out of the Shire,) Our house here in Adams Point, Oakland is named for that worthy establishment. But none our windows are round.
Now let’s get this straight. I started the Prancing Pony for the money. Taking in paying guests kept our heads above water in some pretty bad times. I didn’t know what I was doing, keeping the room clean and the beds properly dressed. (Y’all know I’ve never been a doting house keeper.) Once I started having guests, there was dust everywhere, there were spider webs in abundance and who is going to wash those windows? Leaving our bedroom door ajar in the heat of Fall can be problematical.( We still need to put cat doors in three access points.) But with time and well placed criticism, we slowly pulled ourselves together and got in the groove of looking after people.
B & B means bed and breakfast. And I really do offer breakfast, it says so on my page. All I need to know is what a guest might want. But nobody tells me, nobody asks. They just wander through the kitchen on their morning way to the loo. On their way back I ask if they want tea or coffee. Our most recent guests were from South of the border, from Bogota and Mexico City. I do not like coffee but I know how to make it. I’ve been concocting the elixir vitae almost 28 years, for the middle son of the Star of Havana. If you can’t see through it, it’s almost strong enough. My guests like their coffee black.
And then there is the question of water. Many of our guests arrive with water bottles, mostly plastic, and I offer them glasses of water. When they see me open the tap, they are taken aback. I’m from the Pasadena area and we call that water “Pasadena crude.” But the water here in the Bay Area is simply wonderful. On the East Bay side, it comes from the Mokelumne River, which is fed by the snow in the Sierras. San Francisco and the Peninsula get their water from Hetch-Hetchy reservoir, which is fed by the snow in the Sierras. So yeah, our water is really tasty. The Germans think it has too much chlorine. They can be hard to please.
One of our earliest guests were a lovely young couple on the last leg of a very long honeymoon, all over South East Asia. She was graceful and tall as a young linden tree. He was taller, 6’4’’, and when he saw that their bed was a king, he just fell on it with a small yelp of joy. The young husband had been folding his long Finnish frame into beds designed for much smaller people. So far, these folks are why we have a pin in Helsinki on the map of Europe. In our front hall, between the guest bath and the kitchen, are the maps. On one side are the National Geographic maps of the United States and The World. On tuther side is the Michelin map of Europe. On the top shelf of the cookbook library is a pretty crystal bowl. The bowl holds pins with round colored tips. When guests come to the Prancing Pony, they are offered a pin from the bowl and asked to place the pin in one of the maps. I ask them to put the pin in either their current place of residence or the place that they come from. Just recently a guest, looking at the sea of pins in the L A area, chose to put her pin in the Philippines, her mom is from there. Two sweet girls were here from Moscow. One of them was from Sakhalin Island. I’m very proud of that pin. And then there is the small but mighty nation of the Netherlands. There are so many pins between Utrecht and Amsterdam that there isn’t any more room. Is there a trail of bread crumbs from these two great cities to the Prancing Pony? The Dutch love to travel.
There are the places with no pins at all. I’ve only got one in the entire continent of Africa. And let’s talk about Tornado Alley. Idaho, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas where the hell are you? Come to the Bay Area, come to Oakland and stay at the Prancing Pony, you will have a wonderful time. Oh and speaking of time, we need to talk. My darling guests come from all over the world and many of the dears can’t read a map. They look at a map of my great state and say to themselves “Hey, there is Yosemite, we can get there and back in a day.” Sure you can sweetheart, you will spend 4 & 1/2 hours getting to the Groveland Gate and then 45 minutes to get to the Valley Floor. It just looks close but it ain’t. The lines you see on the maps are not freeways, they are highways. The 120 is two lanes in each direction, sometimes. When you go up the New Priest Road into Groveland, it is really circuitous and takes about 25 minutes. I am not being fair to those who do not know this state. It is a Tardis, much bigger on the inside than on the outside. And the distances are so much longer and higher and slower to travel than they look.
So they come to my house. They come with international sized luggage all the way from SFO to start a full tour of the Southwest. They come with overnight backpacks to enjoy a concert at the Fox or Paramount. They come for music festivals and to work at Kaiser. Sometimes they check themselves in, sometimes they come in late, just as long as they come. Because I love to look after them and am having a wonderful time.
1 comment:
You don’t share the secret of the Old Priest Road? That’ll shave off 10 minutes! Just be sure to turn off the air conditioner so your engine doesn’t overheat and make sure your breaks are in good condition on the way home.
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