Get ready for a new column of the HPP: The Adventures of Dowling, featuring our correspondent from her travels. Introducing… Claudia Dowling!

By Claudia Dowling

We landed in San Francisco, California—do not call it Frisco or Cali!—to see friends and relations. Yes, your Harbor Pond Post guest correspondent has them all over the place.

Jamie Whittington, Hannah Gasner’s brother Adam’s mom (I know, right?), who I’ve been friends with for more than 40 years, picked me up at the airport and drove me across the Golden Gate Bridge to her house in Sausalito, a picturesque town on the San Francisco Bay famous for its houseboats.

We proceeded to do a lot of yakking and a lot of visiting. We drove down to Orinda, on the other side of the Bay to visit my brother Ben and wife Nirinjin, who had recently moved to a new house far enough from neighbors that he can do recording sessions on his pair of Steinway grand pianos (one of which he promises to the editor of this paper if she retains her interest in playing piano). Jamie and Peter and I also had visits from Ben’s daughter Sara, Hannah’s first cousin, who vows to visit Block Island this summer to see everyone.

One cloudy day, Peter Pastreich, Jamie’s husband, took me and a friend out on their 30-foot sailboat. We saw houseboats, including one built to look like the Taj Mahal, as well as the Golden Gate bridge, Angel Island, the Ellis Island of the west where the immigration center processed—one can’t say welcomed—Chinese immigrants in the early 1900s. And then we were becalmed near Alcatraz, the island that contained the notorious prison that closed in 1963. Both islands are now historical tourist attractions reached by ferry. We sped back to the dock at 7 plus knots in time for dinner with Adam and his daughter, Hannah’s neice and Jamie’s granddaughter and my step granddaughter (is that perfectly clear?). And my time in sometime sunny and now torrential rainy California was coming to an end. Next stop Taiwan.

The Adventures of Dowling: Part 1

Valentine’s Day Music Concert

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