The Old Clam House

Thanks very much for all the comments on my recent transcontinental blips. I appreciate the continuing interest while I'm away - I'll catch up with your own journals soon!
Today we drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to upmarket Sausalito - think $$$ clothing boutiques and art galleries - to visit my Dad's memorial bench. He was a carpenter and joiner by trade and spent several happy years working in a boat yard down by the bay shore. When he died, we had the bench built in a little park overlooking the yard. He inadvertently chose the epigraph himself. It reads "I'd be a connoisseur of gulls and every day I'd open a new horizon". Dad was a poetry buff and on one of his last coherent days (he passed from a brain tumour) we spent some time talking about his favourites. Somehow the conversation drifted on to Scottish poet Alasdair Maclean and when the time came to chose an epigram I remembered the conversation and took the line from one of the poems we'd discussed. It seemed to sum up Dad's love of books, tools and architecture and his general, intellectual restlessness. Happily, the park is a hot and happening hang out for the local gulls , so that worked quite well. The local hobos seem to like it too.
Later - more seafood! It's becoming a theme. My six year-old niece Evie, who got a mention in a previous blip, had been chattering on and off for days about somewhere called 'The Old Crab Shack'. It turned out to actually be called 'The Old Clam House' but Evie loves crab - as well as 'clam juice', a kind of fishy dipping sauce served in this particular eatery. As far as she is concerned, it is 'so yummy sauce'. And after I'd tried it, I had to agree. I opted for calamari steak, while Evie - surprise! - had crab.
The Old Clam House - now surrounded by gas stations and warehouses on Bayshore Boulevard - has supposedly been serving on the site since 1861 - just a few years after the legendary Gold Rush! That's a lot of fishy goings-on! (Can you see the hitching posts on the sidewalk outside?)