Sunday morning brought breakfast at McDonald’s, since the Chicken Pie Shop was closed and everyplace else had long lines full of small children. I toured more of the city, taking this year’s series of pictures along Motel Drive, including a few shots of a motel which had burned a day or two before.
Along the way, I stopped in at an old dowdy Save-Mart supermarket (a Fresno chain) to buy a disposable camera. Just to be safe, I made a Count Chocula scan. They had it. I shrieked. Fresno housewives looked at me funny. I didn’t care.
I definitely took the long way home to San Francisco:
Madera is asmall agricultural town just north of Fresno, which looks alternately prosperous and depressed. Nice homes and tree-lined streets are found west of Highway 99, while the east side contains a seedy downtown and people living in old motels.
Merced has an interesting downtown with at least one passable used bookstore. There are some great buildings, a great old hotel, and an unbelievable number of houses…miles of them. Where do these people work? I haven’t figured it out yet.
I also stopped in Los Banos, Morgan Hill, and San Jose on the way back. I was hot and tired and getting a case of the sniffles and a sore throat. But something told me to take the old route through San Jose and santa Clara. And, lo and behold, what should I notice on El Camino but a Save-Mart, possibley the only one existing outside Fresno.
I hit the brakes, to the annoyance of at least seven yuppies. I almosy jumped the median. I walked into the Save-Mart. There was Count Chocula. I shrieked again. Since this was Silicon Valley, there were no housewives to give me funny looks. I hit the checkout and wondered at the fact that I’d driven to a town almost 200 miles away to learn, after seven years in San Francisco, that the chocolate marshmallow treat was available only forty miles from home.
Great things always happen to me when I visit Fresno.