Guests are coming to visit this year. We’ve promised to show them all of Benicia and the best of the Bay Area. I’m brainstorming now for must sees and can’t misses.
I’m devising a way that allows my guests to have equal opportunity at choosing the sights and senses we see, while allowing me as host to offer suggestions. It will be a friendly questionnaire to be filled out together during early arrival wine tasting.
I’m calling it The Trinity Helps. This is because it helps me sort out my own favorite places in the Bay Area. Guests will be given a list of categories and must select three responses for each one. The answers should not list business names or specific locations. They must be open-ended and express experiences you wish to have in the Bay Area.
For example, under dining options, besides menus, Italian, Swedish, whatever, list three experiences you’d like to have. Do you want to eat outside overlooking the sea? Do you want to eat on a boat or an island? Do you want live entertainment? Magic? Prefer home cooking or haute cuisine? Will it be high brow, low brow, organic brow, or Lowenbrau?
For nightlife responses, guests must again be open-minded and describe their desired experiences. Do they want to be shocked and amazed? Do they prefer a more earthy turf? Visitors to my home don’t need to know a thousand Bay Area club names. Simply fill out the Trinity Helps questionnaire, and we will extrapolate a location to fit your whims.
List three nightlife experiences you want to have in the Bay Area. Live stage extravaganza, or quiet, uncrowded calmness? Live music, dancing? See a show? Do you want a tour of dive bars or top-floor cocktail lounges?
In general, what sights call you out? Manmade or natural? Marine vistas or museums? Are you a history buff? A nature buff? Want to see a free city college? We can go to a mountain top, drive down through the redwoods, and roll out to the ocean.
Anyhow, that’s the germinal nature of The Trinity Helps, my Schedule of Fun Brainstorming Activity. I will add other categories to the list as I think of them. It’s useful to create a schedule of fun in advance. Many times I have taken friends to Berkeley or San Francisco only to visit the same circle of sights. It’s fun for them, well tested, but getting old for me. Often it is only after the visit has ended that we think, with groans, of places we missed.
My original plan, before the do-it-yourself Trinity idea hit me, got tossed in the trash. I had scrawled a list of vacation categories for visiting guests — food, entertainment, sightseeing, adventures and road trips – then I goofed – I proceeded to fill the darn thing out with my own favorite places. That’s a narrow view. If my guests are exactly like me, they’ll have a ball at the Hotsy Totsy. Otherwise, they may be polite and curse me at home for wasting their time.
I’m about to meet a childhood acquaintance from Pennsylvania over in San Francisco. He wrote a book about Ridgway, fiction, and I’m in it. That’s all I know. Joe will tell me the story and hand me the book, if I know him right. This whole Schedule of Fun list started because I was brainstorming for places to take Joe, like the Beat Museum, and cursed myself for not already having a list. I decided to make one and sat down with a scratch pad. After listing a dozen restaurants, clubs, and tourist attractions, I realized I was wasting my time. There are too many.
The tour has to be customized to match each guest. My tours must work for lovers of country, mud wrestling, and opera; budding bohemians; art lovers; music lovers; social butterflies and night crawlers. When they come to visit Steve, they get the tour of a lifetime. It’s my duty to match specifics to their generals.
I’ve always played tour guide since I moved here in 1978. When I came to the Bay Area, I studied the region by hand drawing street maps of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley from road maps. I made acronyms and acrostics of street names. I hopped on my motorcycle and drove up and down most of them, until I knew them.
This retired business is working out all right. For Tuesday: augment Schedule of Fun. Get colored markers.

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

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