Sense of Direction
Saturday, September 1st, 2007From the first time I stuck out my thumb at age 14 headed north on the Merritt Parkway out of New York City and found my way seamlessly, after numerous rides, to a teacher’s farmhouse in Northern Vermont, I held a cocky pride in my “great sense of direction.” It took 38 years and several circumnavigations of the globe to have this pretense shot to hell by a short drive from San Francisco International Airport (SFO) to Marin County.
I was familiar with the Bay Area. In 1999 I spent a month living on the forested grounds of the Presidio, at the northwest tip of San Francisco, to take an interesting but pretentiously titled course accredited by Goddard College: “Sustainable Ethical Enterprise Design.” Five years earlier I spent more than a year in Sonoma, just an hour’s drive north of the Golden Gate, managing a 200-acre conference center ranch where, under wide-limbed grandfather oaks, amid colorful organic gardens and in mission-style cottages, I welcomed spiritual warriors and seekers. So I thought I knew my way around when I arrived at SFO and rented a silver-colored PT Cruiser to drive to Book Passage in Corte Madera, on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge, for a four-day Travel Writer’s Conference. No problem.
aysha