Every year around this time, I visit San Francisco for work. I usually take a couple of days of vacation following our event and I make the appropriate plans and reservations for my personal time. Well, this year, time just got away from me and on Saturday night I came to the stark realization that I needed to check-out of my hotel on Sunday...but my return flight wasn't until Tuesday.

Somehow, I developed a "thing" for living out the lyrics of certain songs that I like. Earlier this year, following another trip for work in Anaheim, I went to Santa Catalina Island inspired entirely by the Crosby, Stills and Nash song Southern Cross. "From a noisy bar in Avalon I tried to call you..." and I did. Well, not YOU exactly, but I did try to call a friend from a noisy bar in Avalon, the small town on Catalina referenced in the song.

Certainly I'd like to live-out the entire song and sail to the Marquesas and Papeete as well...but at this stage of my life, I'm still relegated to a single verse...

There are plenty of places in San Francisco to do the same, but I've been enamored with Monterey and Sausalito for a while. I went to Monterey last year. So, on Sunday morning, I threw a change of clothes in my backpack, chucked my suitcase inside one of our exhibit crates which were headed back to Chicago following a recently completed trade show, then hiked down to the Ferry Building and jumped on the ferry to Sausalito.

Purely at random, I booked a room at the Hotel Sausalito. After visiting the hotel web site, I learned that the hotel was once home to actor Sterling Hayden, Captain McCluskey in GF1. I never knew much about Hayden, assuming only that he acted. Turns out he's also a respected author with an autobiography called "The Wanderer" and a novel about the sea that's titled "Voyager." And there's some talk that he once had an old railroad passenger car in the area that once served as his makeshift office. The Godfather connection was a pleasant surprise.

For the record (no pun intended...), I consulted the tidal charts just to make sure that, at just the right time, I was "sittin' on the dock of the bay watchin' the tide roll away." I watched the ferries come and go from San Francisco, and as if on cue, a massive freighter was leaving Oakland and headed toward to the Golden Gate Bridge and out into open water.

According to musician Steve Cropper, Otis Redding never really wrote a complete song. He would have a phrase or a sentence and an idea of where he wanted to go with a song and Cropper would collaborate with him to write the rest of the lyrics and try to match Redding's vision for the song. Apparently Redding had visited Sausalito following a show in San Francisco and was "watchin' the ships roll in, and watch 'em roll away again." That was as much as they needed and a few more rhyming phrases later, Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay was born. (Wiki substantiates most of this...I remember this based on something I read years ago...)

Also, thanks to the band Diesel for Sausalito Summer Nights c. 1981. It's a driving song, but I did not rent a car for this trip. None-the-less, 35 years after first hearing the lyrics "I'll have a burger and a root beer" I enjoyed both at a little burger joint on Bridgeway.

tony b.

We were in SF last T'giving, and visited Sausalito as well. Been to both many times. Always worth a visit.

Sterling Hayden was a fine actor with many good movies to his credit. He always played in character--one of those actors whose personality defined the roles he played. He was fine in a small role in "The Godfather." But, if you really want to appreciate him, check out "Asphalt Jungle," the finest American heist movie ever made; and "Suddenly," a little gem of a movie about an attempted Presidential assassination.