Day 1-Facing a wall of fog

"Turning points", "new chapter of life", "moving on," are phrases people have thrown at me with great frequency over the last couple of months. So of course it had some affect and turned me into a walking Lifetime movie on the first morning of the road trip.

We packed the car and I wanted to have a goodbye moment with the Bay Area. So off into the hills of Berkeley we went to stop at the lookout/makeout point of Fish Ranch Road. (A very cool mountain road with a view of the entire bay that is only 5 minutes off the freeway.)

A normal August morning for the Bay Area, with skies thick of fog on the ground and in the hills, fog moving and bellowing up the mountain like a Hitchcockian wet dream.

So I stood there, for my moment of Hallmark reflection, trying to not shiver in front of the huge wall of fog we faced.

A poetic way to start our journey, which was so far 15 minutes in.

Running quickly to the car to get warm again we turned the key and nothing. Turned the key again-nothing but a psycho click sound symphony and flurry of light action on the dashboard.

With AAA card in hand and three cellphones with no service, we flagged down the happy morning drivers of the Berkeley Hills.

At 8am, with a backseat full of kitchen supplies and a gigantic coffee table with the radio still playing Energy 92.7 (the dance "gay" channel of San Francisco) we were finally rescued by a Lexus SUV who had jumper cables.

We shivered at the lookout point. He connected the positive and negative to my battery and looked at us suspiciously.

"When did the battery go out?" he asked.

"Right now," I said.

He looked at us sideways-trying to figure out if the two woman at makeout, I mean lookout point had a U-Haul to go with all of their visible backseat home gear.

"What were you guys doing here?" he wondered.

"Checking out the view," I said as a cloud of fog drifted by.

"Right," he said looking intently at Uyen and me.

A fine way to start I say.