Mountain View Days

We’ve had a lovely week in Mountain View. Temperatures in the seventies, cloudless blue skies, leaves crunching underfoot—a perfect California fall. Lucia and I have explored a bit further afield in the past couple of days. Yesterday we drove to Los Altos and walked around the cute downtown, full of nice shops and at least three fabulous toy stores. Today we went to the Stanford Shopping Center, an outdoor mall in Palo Alto, and browsed around for a bit. And Andrew and I have been sampling some of Castro Street’s restaurant offerings this week: ramen at a Japanese noodle house on Tuesday; burritos on Wednesday; and sushi tonight. All delicious.

I took Lucia to another free-trial gym class on Tuesday, at The Little Gym. Like the Gymboree class, Lucia was not amused. She did not want to crawl from the center of a circle to me, on the outside. She did not want to sit either on or underneath the gigantic parachute. She did not want to “walk” on a balance beam. She did not want to sit on a ball and bounce. She enjoyed a tunnel during “free exploration” time, and a soft padded ramp/slide, but the organized activities were not a hit. I can’t blame her, really. The child-Margo would have stuck to the tunnel too. Especially if a stash of books was inside.

The weather today is cooler; and next week is supposed to be in the forties and fifties. And so our imminent departure is less painful than it might otherwise be. We still don’t have plane tickets; but it looks like we’ll be heading East this weekend, to Jacksonville for Thanksgiving and then back to Brooklyn. I have a feeling this is not the last we’ll see of Mountain View—and the big revelation of this little journey has been that we feel very much okay with that. It’s nice here. But we don’t live here, and staying on indefinitely just doesn’t make sense. So now—on we go to winter.