moving piem

Colorful groves at Grooves

Guillaume and I both love music, and especially on records. We spent a few afternoons digging the crates in downtown Frisco. We first went to Rooky Ricardo's Records, on Haight Street, where Steve owns a large collection of Soul music, before skimming through various thrift store in Mission.

I couldn't resist and asked again to take a few portraits, as I did earlier in New York.

At Amoeba, probably one of the most famous record store on this planet, we found even more records. As I asked to take their pictures, James, from San Francisco, picked the phone to 'look busy', while Nick, from Los Angeles, kept his grin as he was sorting out my selection.

We also had a nice chat with Kelley at Grooves Vinyl Attractions on Market Street, in his beautiful shop full of gems made of movie soundtracks, instrumental rarities and other odd sounds.

With more than 30 records each, plus the ones I had found in Chicago and Madison, Guillaume left with a very very heavy bag loaded with vinyl.

Decompression

We arrived with Xavier on a Sunday afternoon, just in time to join Valérie, a friend from Barcelona, at the main stage of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, in the middle of the Golden Gate Park. After 3 months in the middle of United States, it was quite a change to dive into a crowd of hipsters and hippies.

For one week, I was lucky to stay at the wonderful Studio G, with Valérie, Lauren, Sue, Jef, Amy, Melisa, Kaleena, Derrick... Studio G and H are located in a massive warehouse next to Mission. For the past ten years or so, they have been arranged and re-arranged as two big communities of house mates.

After a busy week in San Francisco, it was time already for Xavier to take off for Los Angeles then Hawaii. We had spent almost three amazing weeks on the road together, and I hope we will soon meet again, somewhere in South America maybe... ... more

Wildfire in Yosemite

After a chilly night above Mammoth Lakes, we drove down back to the valley and kept going North towards the beautiful scenery of Yosemite National Park, a paradise for rock climbing and hiking, where the granite cliffs dive into clear lakes shadowed with old pine trees. Most of the park is above 2500 meters.

We spent half a day driving across the park, enjoyed a breakfast near a lake of crystal clear water, and started going down towards the coast. As we were following Tioga Pass Road, we ran into a wild fire that was carefully controlled by tens of firemen and rangers. Very impressive.

We both wished we could have stayed longer, but we had to be in San Francisco before Monday since Xavier was starting work at the French Lycée on Monday. So we kept driving west across the orchards, stopped for lunch in a field of almond trees, and arrived near Oakland by the middle of the afternoon to join a traffic jam at the entrance of Bay Bridge.

Dune

We drove North West outside Las Vegas and took a left at Beatty. For ten kilometers, the road was following a straight line before entering the State of California and Death Valley National Park. We stopped to cook lunch for a while, and just as we were packing our stove, felt a few drops of rain. Somewhat surprising in one of the driest spot of North America.

The rain didn't last, and we went for a little hike on the gigantic sand dunes of Mesquite Flat. From the distance, we saw the wind picking up, lifting the sand in whirly motions, and approaching quickly and soown we were running back to the car, protecting our faces and our camera with our shirt from the sand.

We kept driving across the national park, crossed its several mountain ranges, took a right at Lone Pine to drive North all the way to Mammoth Lakes, passed the ski slopes above Mammoth Lakes, and found a nice view point on Devils Postpile where we cooked diner and sat up our camp for the night.

Vegas, baby

We spent two nights in Vegas, crawling the gigantic casinos installed at the feet of some of the biggest hotels in the world. Our host Lorenzo showed us the strip on the first evening, and we went in the old part of the town on the second one.

Xavier likes to play poker, so he had a go and joined a table of the Bellagio. I sat behind him and watched. The characters at his table all seemed to be part of a movie. On a table nearby, the chips were of different colors. There was enough money there to keep me traveling several lifetimes.

It was an interesting visit, although it often felt very uncomfortable in this strange atmosphere where kitsch, glitter and vaguely erotic are blended in a 'buy now, spend more' fashion. We were happy to take the road again to the desert, leaving the strip behind.