Living here on the upper lip of the Bay Area, like a beauty mark, it’s easy to take one-day  excursions around the rim without a lot of planning. Susan and I wake up sometimes with the urge to go do, but we can’t do new stuff all the darn time.
“I gotta get my steps,” she says.
Currently we are staying close to home. Two guys close to us, a friend and a family member, are both going under the knife for cancer removal. I won’t share personal details at this time, but Susan and I are on standby to run errands, shuttle grandkids, and make soup. This doesn’t stop us from taking short excursions.
“We gotta keep moving,” she says. “Remember the Tin Man.”
One short, healthy, inexpensive, always interesting excursion we greatly enjoy is to walk the length of College Avenue starting at the Rockridge BART Station in North Oakland. We ditch our car right away at the Pleasant Hill BART and ride the train round-trip through the tunnel and the traffic into town for $8.10.
Get yourself a Clipper Card if you don’t already have one. It saves you a lot of time at the turnstiles. It’s like a Fastrak pass that you manually replenish.
When you step out of the Rockridge Station there is Market Hall on the corner. It hosts an organic butcher, baker, fishmonger, grocer, wine merchant, coffee roaster, and a few other vendors. On many occasions I’ve hopped BART to Rockridge on my own to pick up happy-pig ribs, wild fish, and pampered chickens for my smoker. You can leave the train, buy meat and fish and be back on the return train in 30 minutes or less.
College Avenue is great for strolling and windows shopping. All the stores are occupied, and the sidewalks are crowded. Whether you head south toward Broadway or north into Berkeley, on both sides of the street are fine restaurants, small diners, gift shops, book stores, toy stores, candy stores, craft beer and cocktail lounges.
We so far have a couple favorite stops on our stroll. We walk north to Noodle Theory, an outstanding ramen and udon shop where every bowl is a unique creation. The restaurant is narrow on a pointy triangular corner at Claremont Avenue and 62nd Street. We learned from experience. It opens at 11 a.m. and you better get there before the noon lunch hour begins or the place will fill up and you’ll have to wait. We plan our train ride to coincide.
When we are taking a light stroll, we’ll turn around after the Elmwood area at Ashby Avenue. First we stop in at Nabolom Bakery to see if they have anything good left. And anything is good. Usually the racks are empty. I’ve been eating cheese Danish at Nabolom’s since the 1970s and the place gets wiped out early.
On our way back south toward the train station we like to stop at Smitten Ice Cream. (Special note: if you have ever had Smitten ice cream, you are at this moment oohing and aahing with the recollection of it, I’m betting; if you have not yet been Smitten – your ice cream is made before your eyes using liquid nitrogen and a lot of billowy frost – you need to hop a train and take the children. So creamy. Tiny crystals.
We took our grandsons, Tyler and Jack, for a College Avenue stroll just last week. They had a ball. We had ramen, ice cream, and pastries. We walked all the way to the Berkeley campus, across the campus to the north side, rested at La Val’s, then walked down to Shattuck Avenue, ate at Top Dog, and hopped the downtown Fremont-bound BART to MacArthur Station where we transferred back to the Pittsburg Line, rolled through Rockridge and on to Pleasant Hill and a movie, “Darkest Hour,” where Gary Oldman wins the Oscar.
Just so you know, if you ever go, getting off BART at Rockridge and walking to the Berkeley Station only added twenty cents to the fare. Kids and folks over 65 can apply for a discount Clipper Card. Sue pays 60 cents on the dollar.
Anyhow, we have been riding the train to Rockridge and walking College Avenue for a lot of years, and I want to close by reiterating: wow! The area is experiencing a prosperity boom. So much is going on. New appealing restaurants and night clubs have opened and I just want to keep going back and eat my way up the street.
We were walking College Avenue right after New Years with Gino and Patricia and we bumped into Anjuli Peters from Benicia and her boyfriend coming the other way. They too were strolling College Avenue.
Now, there’s a story for another time, Gino’s third visit in two months. Gino flew out this third time with his girlfriend Patricia for Christmas and New Year’s. We wanted to go cheap and still have fun on New Year’s Eve so we went to the Warehouse in Port Costa. No cover charge and great live music. A hoot worth repeating.
That’s all we did while they were here. We went blues dancing at Kesler’s on a Wednesday, New Year’s Eve in Port Costa, and a stroll down College Avenue. They flew home contented.

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

Sharing is caring!