Oakland - 8 April 2011

Three day weekend?  Let’s make it a four day weekend and drive to Northern California.  Ok let’s do it!!!!  We drove up after work the Thursday night to get there early Friday morning. After some well deserved sleep. We spend our first day in Oakland due to neither of us being there before.  We started our first day off with some breakfast to fuel up for the day at the Oakland grill.  The food was great and the mimosa’s were cheap.  Then we decided to check out Jack London Square but first stopped at a historical bar called Merchants.  Merchants has been around since 1916 and still had some of the original furniture in there along with a built in urinal at the base of the bar.  Apparently back in the day women were not aloud in the bars (talk about a sausage fest) so, the men would just urinate right at the bar.  At Jack London Square we stumbled across Jack London’s actually log cabin and another very historic bar called Heinold’s.  This bar not only was completely slanted at 30 degrees from a previous earthquake, but was also the first place to get a drink when getting off the boats, and the last place to get a drink before heading out to sea. Therefore the slogan "First and Last Chance" came about.  This place was great.  A must see if you are in the Oakland area.  A little bit later that day we went on a scenic drive to the top of a hill overlooking the whole bay.  I honestly can’t remember the name of the hill we went to but, it had an incredible view and very pretty scenery.  Apparently this was the inspiration for the song “When the lights go down in the city”.  Our lovely guests decided to treat us to a romance duet of the song as we watched the sunset. 

Welcome to Oakland BITCH!!!