Am I a creature of habit or a man of adventure? Sometimes I wonder. I write a lot of stories of travel and exploration, but there’s often an underlying sameness to the events.
Take eating for example. When I moved from rural PA to metropolitan CA and landed a phone company job in downtown Oakland back in the early 1980s, I branched out and tried Chinese food for lunch. After all, I came to California for new experiences. I ordered the mushroom chicken, and I liked it. For the next six years, I ate every weekday at the same Chinese restaurant on Webster and Broadway. Every lunch was mushroom chicken.
For those six years I lived in downtown Berkeley, land of a thousand restaurants perhaps. As a single youth living in a one-room studio apartment with no debt, I ate out most every meal. I expanded my horizons and dined in a dozen establishments, places like Blondies, Top Dog, Persian Bongo Burger, Homemade Café, Brennen’s, Nabolom Bakery and so on.
Once I had familiarized myself with about a dozen restaurants, I seldom ate anywhere else. I kept returning to my haunts. At each place, I always ordered the same menu items. At Blondie’s, I’d have the pepperoni slice. At Top Dog, I’d have the kielbasa. Two eggs with hash browns were my morning ritual at Bongo Burger. Corned beef and cabbage was all I ever ate at Brennan’s, and I’d munch a cheese Danish at Nabolom. When friends visited and I took them out to eat, they got the impression that I was an adventurer.
When we travel the country and stop to eat, if it’s breakfast I’ll order the biscuits and gravy in any state. It doesn’t matter to me what the specials are. I judge breakfast places by their biscuits and gravy. That takes talent. Anyone can fry an egg. If it’s an Italian meal, I’m ordering pasta al pomodoro or seafood stew. If it’s Mexican, I’m ordering enchiladas. At barbecue joints, I gotta have me some ribs. So, adventure or habit?
We do a lot of traveling, but usually it’s to visit repeat locations, like Tahoe, Reno, Bay Area, Yosemite, the northern coast, a few foothill towns and rivers, and Pennsylvania. Yes, we’ve been to Europe three times, but always found ourselves in Italy. There was a time when the children were small that we circled America, driving along the borders from Canada to New Orleans in a wide loop, collecting magnets and spoons in many states, but it only happened twice, and we stayed in KOAs all the way.
I enjoy live music festivals. I’ve been to Reggae on the River eight times, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass six times and the Hayward Blues Festival four times. I haven’t been to many other music festivals. No Bonnaroo, no Coachella, no Lollapalooza, no Newport Folk. Adventure or habit?
I’m a big fan of the craft beer movement, and I’ve visited at least 50 breweries. In addition to hitting ones in the Bay Area and Sacramento, we’ve taken the 14-brewery tour in Bend, Ore., and last year Susan and I created our own Craft Beer Across America Tour, driving ourselves to Iowa and back, via Fort Collins and Boulder, Co. We checked off another 14 breweries. That’s a lot of variety, but I always ordered the IPA. No stout, no porter, no pilsner, no sours. That’s not a lot of variety. At wineries, it would be zinfandel that came home with me.
I love to shop, but only at Goodwill and thrift stores. I like arcades, but I only play the pinball machines. I love to dance, but I only do the boogaloo.
I can’t seem to find my way out of this echo chamber of joy. When you find something you like, you want to do it again, right? Been there, done that, loved it. Who doesn’t want to return to a place that makes them happy?
Some people, I suppose, have ongoing new experiences. They eat somewhere new on a regular basis and try the whole menu. They travel to new destinations and see new things. I keep trying to reach out, if only for the sake of this column, to find new experiences to write about. What confounds me is how people can find room for new experiences when the old experiences still have a spark and a tickle?
We spent last week in Tahoe flopping around our cabin as usual. We walked the bike trail to Pope Beach as usual. We strolled up to The Brothers Bar and Grill for football, beer, and appetizers as usual.
At The Brothers, we met an animated local guy named Doug, who sat beside us and immediately engaged us in conversation. Doug never gave a straight answer to any question. “What do you do, Doug?” “What don’t I do?” “How do you make a living?” “I have inventions.” “How did you end up in Tahoe?” “Who says I ended up in Tahoe? I may move again.”
Then he finagled the bartender, who he called Tiberius though his name is Eric, into putting 50 credits on the juke box. Doug told me to play my favorites, and excused himself. He went outside and came back ten minutes later with two ordinary pine sticks about three feet long. He set them at his feet. “You never know when you’ll need them,” he said.
There’s always something new going on at The Brothers.

Steve Gibbs is a retired Benicia High School teacher who has written a column for The Herald since 1985.

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