MARTINEZ MARTINI MARCH

Yesterday, El Sueno and I got up at the crack of 9:00 and tossed around ideas on what to do, when to do it and, most importantly, what to eat when we were doing it…Ok, now that sounds dirty, but you get what I mean. After all, you are a HEAD Society member!

Anyway, we decided it was a perfect day to pre-Martini the November 5 trail (also, I needed to make a trip to the teacher store to San Leandro which is about halfway there and it was greener to combine trips…”Greener? Why not take the train?” you ask, “It goes right to downtown Martinez!” To which we reply, “We checked into that, but Amtrak costs $18 per person EACH WAY to go from Fremont to Martinez and we love all you HEAD Trippers, but that’s a LOT of cash to drop on an investigational adventure! That said, we’ll be happy to meet you at the train station on the actual Martini Day. Martinez is a tiny town and it’s only a short walk from anywhere to anywhere else there. Carpooling is also an option…) So we hopped in the car and headed north.

An hour (or so) later, we arrived in the teeny, tiny town of Martinez. In only a minute we found that the home of the original Martini, now a Thai restaurant, was closed on Sundays. On peeking through the window, we noticed that there is not a full bar there, so we were unlikely to get Martinis with our pad thai. We started scouting the street for substitute bars.

There were two that we thought might fit the bill until we heard crashing and yelling sounds coming out of one (might’ve just been a dropped tray, might have been a homicide, we didn’t wait for details.) There were two sweaty guys in motorcycle leathers having a political discussion in front of the other one. They raised some good points, but they were really sweaty and we didn’t want to go there. So we chose the Ferry Street Station for our Martinez Martinis. It meets out stringent requirements for HEAD appropriateness. It has a full bar, beer, wine, a clean bathroom and bar food. Plus there are big flat screen TVs so those who choose to do so can sit in the bar enjoying Martinis, beer and college football while the rest of us walk around and peruse the myriad…

ANTIQUE SHOPS that line all the adjacent streets! Ladies! This is gonna be fun! Clear your calendars (and your credit card bills) I smell a shopping trip. And a Head Trip. Oooh – a martini-fueled shopping trip…See you on the 5^th!