Arriving at our hotel in Berkeley, we had an hour before the start of the Bruins game. Isy wanted to relax in the room & this is why I booked a different place than the last time I was in Berkeley - except that the new hotel only had one of those shitty satellite systems where you get 12 obscure channels and the screen goes blue half of the time because of the static. God damnit.

So I headed out into clean-cut downtown Berkeley, where I figured the Cornerstone Craft Beer Bar had about 10 TVs inside and they'd be able to put on the Bruins game.

The bartender seemed confused as I stood there in front of him in a Bruins jersey in sunny California, but he obliged my request and flipped through the guide until he found the game on NBC. I thanked him profusely, tipped well, then grabbed my pint and sat at one of the long, empty tables with 8 chairs.

One thing I thought was funny about this bar was that rap producer Zaytoven - of such hits as Bricks by Gucci Mane, Make Tha Trap Say Aye by OJ da Juiceman & Versace by Migos - was set to perform here tonight. ZAYTOVEN ON THE BEAT! I wasn't laughing as much once I noticed his crew milling about, along with some Instagram models. I was starting to grow worried that they'd shut the bar down for security purposes and we'd all have to leave.

Instead, as the Bruins moved into the 2nd period the length of the game was starting to become a problem, with people showing up in Golden State Warriors gear. Golden State was also in the playoffs and they're just a bit bigger draw here in Northern California than hockey from New England. It got to the point where the place was so jammed with Curry and Draymond jerseys that some guy came over with a whole gang of women and asked if I needed all of the seats at my long table. They looked really confused when they sat and finally observed what I was wearing while engrossed with some random hockey game.

The amazing bartender even left the Bruins game on one of the TVs after the Warriors-Pelicans tipoff. With side-eye glances, I could see people confused with the one random hockey TV, until some of them thankfully noticed me in my Neely jersey, fist-pumping with every zone clearance and Rask save, haha. I was also annoying a fair amount of people when I'd excitedly fist pump and people thought they must've missed something, only to see the Warriors game showing Marv Albert or a Lexus commercial.

Isy would show up halfway through the 2nd period and we left at intermission. I wasn't even out the door before the Bruins TV was changed to Golden State.

Sadly, my legacy wasn't long-lasting.

I didn't overly want to miss any of the 3rd period, but we were also in the Bay Area, it was a fine night, and my favourite baseball team was playing in my favourite ballpark.

We needed to catch the BART train and get down to the O.Co Coliseum for the Athletics and Orioles.

Hurrying into the stadium, I remembered that this park is home to the Shibe Park Tavern where I watched the Penguins blow out the Senators back in 2017. Heading up there, the bartender was able to find the Bruins game and now it was 3-3 in the 3rd. I thanked her profusely and grabbed a beer from their extensive tap list.

The Bruins game would go into overtime & even through my nauseous worry, I was enjoying that I was here at the Shibe Park Tavern watching this. That is until Dan Girardi scored only a few minutes into overtime. Now overwhelmed with the desire to scream, I took to conscious, calm breathing to try and relax.

Staring at the bar, an interjecting voice offered, "oh, I'm really sorry. I don't know anything about hockey, but you're wearing (*points at the screen*) it looks like the same jersey as that team that just lost."

I turned and to my right was a middle-aged woman offering a meek smile. I mustered out a thanks and a defeated nod. She was just trying to be nice and I found it funny in that way I find it hilarious whenever life shits on me.

I wasn't about to let that ruin our time here at the Oakland Coliseum. I've already covered this place extensively, but I also think I'm ready to say it's my favourite ballpark.

With the Athletics working to build a glassy new thing on Oakland's waterfront, I was elated to find myself here again in the handful of years the Oakland Coliseum has left. And for it to be against my Orioles? Yeah I got over the Bruins loss eventually.

The Orioles were absolutely atrocious, but at least they kept it close and only lost 6-4. They moved to 8-24 with the loss & the Athletics moved to 16-16. We missed an Adam Jones dinger in the top of the 1st, but made it to our seats for the bottom of the 1st to see a 3-run dinger by Khris Davis.

Of course I'd been trying to trade for Khris Davis in fantasy for a month knowing that I was going to this game. Damn Scotty at Vintage & Vinyl not trading him to me.

The next morning it was time to check out the sights in San Francisco.

As I'd never been out on any of the piers, I was excited for a stroll out on to Pier 7 today - although we still didn't see any of the sea lions that I assumed hung out at these piers.

(They actually hang out at Pier 39.)

For some reason we ate at quite the place right down on the water in the ferry building, which is why I had to be careful with my wording when I was talking about the "fanciest breakfast" I'd ever had back in New Orleans in last month's update.

We didn't mean to wander into such a fancy place, but we both enjoyed the food, so whatever. The cost was probably worth the memory.

Walking along The Embaradero, we came upon one of the Road Fools 2 spots at the base of Pier 7.

From there, we went for a good walk through the Financial District and up to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Following this trip I told my Mom about visiting this museum and she replied, "oh that's nice. You've met someone and you're doing things you wouldn't normally do!"

What am I, some type of troglodyte who only goes to hockey games and bonfires? I can appreciate an Ellsworth Kelly! Smh.

Anyway, following the art museum, we needed to stop somewhere as it was getting close to 605 eastern and the racing of the Kentucky Derby! We stopped somewhere and paid too much for appetizers just to watch the horses, but there's no way I could miss the Derby.

Afterwards I realized it wasn't as much fun to watch the horses in some random SF bar than it was to watch it with all of my relatives back in Ontario at my grandparents' house. Oh well.

There was a neighbourhood Isy wanted to walk to and I was digging walking through different San Francisco streets than the ones I've always walked down in the Financial District and across from Alcatraz.

Look, a cool little diner!

We'd pass The Tenderloin, laughing because I'd told Isy about two separate friends who went to the area and had their companions scared by the surroundings. "This is The Tenderloin? I don't know, it looks pretty rough!" Isy joked as we passed some guys standing outside and I don't know, some rough-looking construction sites?

Coming upon this attractive liquor store, I popped in to grab a water or a Powerade, but checked out the beer like usual when I'm in the States and there's more interesting selections. Isy was surprised with the fact that I wasn't grabbing a beer & then suddenly we were brown bagging a tall can on Market Street, haha.

(She was actually surprised I wasn't grabbing a 40, but that seemed like a bit much, lol.)

After about an hour, we came to the Castro District, the neighbourhood Isy wanted to see for its importance in LGBT history and rights.

Drawn by cheap Victorian homes that Scandinavian- and Irish-Americans were moving out of for the suburbs, many discharged and returning gay servicemen settled into the Castro. As it grew and became known as the gay capital of the States, it also attracted gay men from throughout the country who came to live in an area where their lifestyle was generally accepted and they could be themselves.

The population of this district and adjacent neighbourhoods swelled to the point that policies and local elections were affected. By 1977, local resident and beloved owner of Castro Camera, Harvey Milk, was elected as a city supervisor and became the first openly gay elected official in the history of California. He would use his position and power to help defeat heinous bills like California Proposition 6, which was brought forward by senator John Briggs, that any teacher showing support for homosexuality would be immediately fired.

Sadly Harvey Milk would be assassinated only 10 months into his tenure. A fellow city supervisor snuck through a basement window of San Francisco's City Hall & shot both Milk and then mayor, George Moscone.

Harvey Milk was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in August of 2009.

Isy wanted to hit up one of the bars around here and get a drink, while I was excited that we could watch some playoff hockey inside. In response, Isy reiterated that she may have been wrong about that coffee place in Redmond having a drive-thru, but she was certain that the bars around here weren't going to have 10 giant flat screen TVs.

And while the bar we entered didn't have all those TVs, it at least had a little 13" box TV like you'd have in your bedroom in the 90s. The TV was showing the San Francisco Giants game and I was happy in that way where I love watching local sports happening in the actual locality.

Afterwards it was time for dinner. Now a lot of the places around here have names like "Does Your Father Know?", "Knobs" and "Moby Dick" (a nautical-theme gay bar), and we chose to have dinner at The Sausage Factory, which was an old school, decent Italian place.

Isy wanted to wrap this all up with a burlesque show, so we headed over to the hallmark Castro Theatre to check on tickets. While standing around and eventually deciding against purchasing any, it was still awesome as there was this extremely flamboyant hypeman, who came over to me with, "oooh! I like your little Wolverine thing you got going on! Rawrrrr!" as he pantomimed Wolverine's claw attacks. I fuckin' died, haha.

After dinner, we simply headed back to the hotel as we were both pretty knackered.

I did briefly try to get Isy to go to yet another Athletics/Orioles game, and while she said I was free to go myself, I didn't really feel like taking the train out there either. Funny thing is the game ended up being a 0-0 slugfest until the 12th inning, LOL.

Speaking of the hotel, I was digging our Nash Hotel as it was easy to tell it was old and authentic. Built by a descendent of the Fischels, daughter Rebecca Fischel hired San Francisco architect August G. Headman to build this hotel on the lot where her parents' modest 1-story home once stood. The Nash Hotel as it would be known, was completed in 1924.

I was a little worried about rolling the dice on another cheap hotel in the Bay Area, but it was totally fine. You could do much worse than the Nash Hotel if you're visiting and not too worried about fancy accommodations or having a personal washroom.

The next day would be the last of this long road trip. Not trusting the cheap hotel to hold onto my luggage, plus not wanting to go back to Berkeley between the afternoon ball game and our nighttime flight, there was only one solution...

Bring all our belongings to the Oakland Coliseum because it amazingly still offers bag storage service!

We didn't annoy a bunch of fans on the subway with all of our luggage, as we were here early on the lightly-packed cars, heading to ballpark brunch on this fine Sunday morning/afternoon. You might listen to all of my bitching about ballpark costs and wonder why I was attending brunch at a professional stadium ($$$), but it wasn't that much more than dining in San Fran or Berkeley, plus it was worth it as a fun special treat.

About the only thing that wasn't ideal was that the bartender today couldn't find the Bruins game today and then the stadium WiFi wasn't good enough to stream the game either. It was okay though, Isy let me know with her data plan that the lousy Bolts had run the clock out on Game 5 and the Bruins promising season was over. Bah.

Anyway, back to the food. Isy wasn't scared off by "ghost pepper cheese" and paid for it by longing for additional glasses of water. She still managed to enjoy her hearty breakfast melt though, between the bouts of intense heat.

I got the much more subtle French Toast Bake with candied walnuts and vanilla custard, which was sweet and tasty and left me concerned that Isy was going to try and trade meals with me. I wanted no part of ghost pepper anything.

I wanted to sit up in the bowels of the coliseum yet again, but Isy strangely thought it was ridiculous not to sit out in the California sunshine when we'd be back in grey Newfoundland in 24 hours.

Okay fine, I gave her three innings of this, haha. After that, even though I was coated in sunscreen and donning my wide-brimmed adventure hat, I had to move back to the shade.

As for the game, outstanding young arm Andrew Triggs of 9 career wins would hold my Orioles to one run over 7 innings on the way to a 2-1 Athletics win.

At least this loss contributed to us picking all-world prospect Adley Rutschman with the first overall pick in the 2019 MLB draft. I mean, we were only 11 wins behind Kansas City for second-to-last place. It was so close!

We couldn't dawdle after the game today since we needed to grab our luggage from the booth outside.

Once there, I tried to tip the woman working & she sternly refused my $10, saying that they simply work to make sure everyone can enjoy Oakland Athletics baseball.

Even people with oversized golf bags containing BMX bikes!? Outstanding!

This is much better than the Washington Nationals, where they know office workers take the clogged subway and need to bring a small backpack inside to attend 7pm starts - only for the Nationals to tighten restrictions while also offering up medium lockers for $2 per hour or large lockers for $3/hour. Support your local billionaire owner, they're starving!

God I love the Oakland Coliseum. I hope I can somehow make it back yet again before they build that new glass ballpark thing on the waterfront in 2024.

(In the above picture my poor sense of smell paid dividends once again as I was standing right next to a giant grease trap dumpster and could still take pictures comfortably while Isy had to flee, lmao. #soft)

The game ended up being a quick one and we didn't have to be at the San Francisco airport until 830pm.

Not in any hurry to get to the airport and overpay for mediocre food and ambiance, we were going to have to take the BART line for about an hour anyway and there were a ton of places we could randomly get off for food or drink.

So we settled on downtown Oakland, which I liked to the point that I'd consider staying in hotel here instead of Berkeley next time. Oakland had some great old buildings and signage, intriguing restaurants and bars, and there were far less people than in Berkeley.

Some hipsters tried to get us to go to some bar and uncomfortably followed us for a few streets, but eventually we lost them and went for Rudy's Can't Fail Cafe.

As it turns out, Rudy's can fail, but this day they were able to provide us with delicious beer and the chance to savour one last dose of green chili. I'd been ordering the green chili options throughout this trip and Rudy's delivered just like the others.

Also, now I can finally say I ate at a Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives location after so many people have asked me. Wait, does it still count if Guy Fieri visited the original Rudy's Can't Fail and I visited the second location? Frig, maybe not.

We probably would have kept walking in Oakland, but we were carrying a lot of stuff and I really wanted to leave all this luggage with United.

At least it gave us enough time for one last cocktail at SFO, to cheers and celebrate a fine trip across 6 states and over 2100 miles (~3400 km).

Thanks for reading as always.