Travel

TRAVEL A sampling of Oakland

Meeting friends, visiting sites during a trip to the East Bay

By TARMO HANNULA

My wife Sarah and I have developed a pattern of treating each other to a night on the town as a birthday gift in places such as San Francisco, Sacramento, Big Sur or Carmel.

In keeping that tradition, Sarah reserved a room at a hotel in Oakland on Jan. 29 for my gift.

We took Highway 129 to Highway 101 north and then rolled up the East Bay on Highway 880 through Fremont and Hayward to San Leandro where we met our longtime friends Jimmy and Carol for coffee.

Our friends suggested Zocalo on Bancroft Avenue where we found an outdoor table to take in the busy downtown life. We’ve found that tracking down friends on our various journeys, even if it only means a quick coffee, takes the trip to a deeper and more meaningful level. We enjoyed catching up with them before heading further north to the Waterfront Hotel for our night at Jack London Square in Oakland.

Our third floor room offered a dramatic, sweeping view of the Oakland harbor and a life-sized bronze statue of Jack London standing at the water’s edge. Right away, we were stunned at how exciting that area was, with scores of trendy shops, cafes, micro-breweries, wine bars and restaurants. A wide path, dotted with benches and informative signs, made for an inviting stroll along the harbor’s edge. While some businesses were shuttered, others were booming with business.

A TV show we’ve come to relish is “Check, Please! Bay Area,” where a group of four guests visit their choices of restaurants and then sit down to compare notes. One of those spots caught our attention: Soba Ichi, a Japanese restaurant in Oakland, so we headed there for dinner. Though fairly crowded,

HISTORIC HOME A log cabin stands in Jack London Square on Oakland's waterfront. The famed American author once lived in the cabin where it was built in Dawson in the Canadian territory of Yukon.

Photos by Tarmo Hannula

CITY CENTER Lake Merritt is surrounded by parkland and city neighborhoods in the center of Oakland.

both indoors and out, we found a table inside after ordering at the counter. Their homemade soba noodles and everything else we had was superb.

The centerpiece of Jack London Square is a rustic log cabin with a bronze statue of a wild wolf keeping watch out front. While the wolf stems from London’s famed novel, “The Call of the Wild,” the cabin offers an intriguing slice of history. It was originally built in the rugged Alaskan wilderness and was London’s home for a year as he and thousands of others poured into the region during the Yukon Gold Rush days of 1897-98. A Jack London enthusiast, Russ Kingman, ended up buying the cabin but not without a quarrel: Historians in Dawson, Canada, also wanted a slice of the London legacy so they agreed to cut the cabin in half. Kingman’s half was then shipped and rebuilt on the Oakland waterfront around 1968.

Right next to the cabin is the world-famous Heinfold’s First and Last Chance Bar, which is also a place London frequented. The rustic wood shack, with its heavily tilting wood floor and bar, offers a steamy taste of the past, with its walls covered with early day photos of Jack, his friends and surroundings of the early 1900s.

We found Wise Sons Jewish Deli for breakfast on Franklin Street. Though their bagel breakfast was fantastic, the tab of $35 for two bagels and one coffee was staggering!

Street metered parking was easy to find near the Oakland Museum of California where we took in the bounty of their exhibit. The centerpiece was “The Mothership: A Voyage into Afro-futurism," which featured more than 50 artists in recognition of Black History Month.

On our way home, we stopped by the small town of Niles, wandered their streets and sampled a few antique stores before heading home to Watsonville.