DAY 28 - PICTURE UPDATE

Day 28 - we stayed with Ray in Mountainview. Here he is with his 2 adorable babies. Ray fed us some great Chinese food and opened a bottle of wine that he bought in Bolivia and was saving for a special occasion. It was all delicious. Thank you Ray for the warm hospitality and fantastic, special wine!

DAY 28 - SUNNYVALE TO PALO ALTO

LOCATION UPDATE: Tomorrow (Tuesday) we will be walking from Palo Alto on El Camino Real to the San Mateo area.

DAY 28: Today was a bittersweet day. You'll see that we ended in a very supportive and encouraging environment, but the beginning part of the day was pretty devoid of support. We had been told to expect great things from this area of our state - "oh, once you start going up the peninsula, you'll have SO much support." Well, we had more support in Atascadero, and most people's response to that is "where is Atascadero?" We figured one of 3 things must be happening: 1) there's some type of "no honking" ordinance that we don't know about or 2) everyone was grumpy because it was raining or 3) people here are not outraged enough about the passage of prop 8.

Something we have noticed in our travels is that in the smaller, more oppressed communities, we were typically welcomed very enthusiasically. In larger, seemingly more progressive communities, we were often greeted very luke warmly. It seems that those of us in more progressive areas have grown somewhat complacent in the fight for equality. Just an obsevation.

Here we are on day 28 ready for rain. We had to change in and out of our rain gear several times throughout the day.

We entered the city of Palo Alto, home to Stanford, today. A woman from Pennsylvania stopped us to sign our petition and give us some lunch money. A man from Santa Cruz came out of a restaurant to talk with us and to sign our petition.

At 2:30-3pm we arrived at Embarcadero and El Camino for a rally with the Raging Grannies! They were a blast! We sang Revoke 8 Christmas carols. They gave us the gift of "equality" wrapped up nicely with a bow. Several tv news stations were there NBC, CBS and the local Spanish station. And a Raging Granny Groupie gave us some wonderul rings that she'd made. The Grannies welcomed us VERY warmly and enthsiastically - Thank you Raging Grannies!

After the rally, we were treated to coffee by Sandy and Melissa (2 friends who drove down from SF) and they delivered us to our next destination. We spent some time swapping stories and very much enjoyed getting to know them. Melissa also came bearing presents! Thank you Melissa and Sandy!

[Update: More photos of the Raging Grannies and Val and Tracie in Palo Alto here! -Sarah]

THANK YOU SAGE

Today, Sage had to "resign" from helping us with our logistics and lodging. So today we say good-bye and thank you. She has been involved in this journey from the beginning and she will be sorely missed. THANK YOU SAGE!! We're thinking of you and wishing you all the best!

DAY 27 - DAY OF "REST"

LOCATION UPDATE: Tomorrow (Monday), we'll be walking down El Camino Real from Sunnyvale to Palo Alto, ending at Embarcadero and El Camino for a rally with the Raging Grannies at 3pm.

DAY 27 - We took a day off from walking to work primarily on compiling our video clips. Jill drove up from Paso Robles to help (meaning she did all the work!). She sat in front of the computer for more than 12 hours, very patiently weeding through our hundreds of amateur video clips!!!! She put together our short YouTube video that you can now link to from our blog. She also weeded through MANY more video clips to compile for a larger project. THANK YOU JILL!!! You rock!!



We also took the opportunity to take care of "administrative" duties. We made new signs - our old ones are sooooo faded. We caught up on some email, etc. Even spending all day, we only put a small dent in everything there is to do for the final few days. We also got some help from Katie and Ben in doing a new flyer to announce the rally in San Francisco. THANK YOU KATIE & BEN!!

At 3pm, we went to a meeting at the DeFrank Center in San Jose. Ray (from yesterday) invited us to attend. There were a group of people meeting to discuss how they can continue to effect change in their communities. This picture includes about one third of the group - they had broken up into smaller groups to brainstorm. It is worth noting that this group had about 300 people attending the day after the election - these are the 30 commited people that keep showing up. They are role models for all of us... we need to KEEP SHOWING UP!

DAY 25 & 26 PICTURE UPDATE

We stayed with Lisa and Bill on nights 25 and 26. It was pretty last minute, and they very warmly welcomed us to the Saratoga area. This picture was taken in their beautiful backyard, where they've lived for 20 years.

Reminder: Palo Alto Rally Today!

Rain or shine! From Granny Ruth of the Raging Grannies:

GREET THE MARCHING DUO who are headed from Southern California to San Francisco to urge the Supreme Court to REVOKE Prop 8.

ARRIVAL TIME/DATE IN PALO ALTO: 3pm, Monday, DEC 15

Location: Embarcadero/El Camino Real

Major intersection next to Stanford U and Palo Alto H.S. in front of Town and Country Shopping Center

Entertainment by: The Raging Grannies with songs against Prop 8 set to holiday tunes

If you get there early you can meet us at Hobee's restaurant (very cool) to have tea or a snack/meal, say hello and if you want help make signs from 2:30PM

Press is expected.

If you get lost you can reach the Granny Hotline at (650) 279-8761.

Please forward to your SF Bay area friends. Tracie and Val plan to arrive in SF later in the week on the 19th at noon in front of the CA Supreme Court building where there will be another rally. Bay area folks can meet and greet them at either or both locations.

-Sarah

DAY 26 - LOS GATOS TO SUNNYVALE

LOCATION UPDATE: Tomorrow, Sunday, we will be taking a break! We may actually sleep until we wake up with NO alarm and then we're going to work on our video clips with Jill. She is driving up from Paso Robles to spend they day editing the clips we've been collecting

DAY 26: We started out on Saratoga/Los Gatos Road in Los Gatos. We didn't take any pictures in Los Gatos.... because it was FREEZING and we didn't want to slow down to take the camera out or we might have gotten frost bite! It was COLD!

We did have one great interaction in Los Gatos. We passed a man and woman walking and they said "good luck." We thanked them and kept walking, because it WAS COLD! After a few minutes, we heard someone yell, "wait!" It was the man we had passed, running to catch up to us. He apologized and said that he just figured out what our signs meant and wanted to support us. He signed our petition, did a video clip to the Supreme Court and insisted on giving us some cash for lunch. As we said goodbye, he mentioned that he's a retired judge and thinks this is a pretty easy decision for the justices to make.

Once we got to Saratoga, our hostess from the night before, Lisa, joined us (with Rookie). Lisa and Rookie walked several miles with us before returning home.

We use bungee cords to attach our signs to our packs and we lost one... so on our walk today, we stopped off at the Home Depot to get new ones. As soon as we walked in, Ms. Claus greeted us cheerfully and loudly - "You guys were in the paper and now you're in my Home Depot?!" She gave us candy canes and sent us to aisle 24.

We passed through Cupertino - not a lot of response from the traffic going by, positive or negative. It seemed that people in Cupertino were too busy today to be bothered with equal rights.

Valerie insisted on putting this picture in of the Sunnyvale sign (that you can't read!) and Tracie's big head (okay, she actually said Tracie's beautiful face)!

We were told that it might start raining today and when we were two blocks from the end of our walk, it started to come down pretty hard. We ducked for cover under this parking shelter and put our rain jackets on.

Then, we met up with Alex - the son of our hosts from last night, and the San Francisco chapter head of Marriage Equality - and Ray, the Santa Clara county chapter head for Marriage Equality. We swapped stories with them about our fight for equality and what we've all been doing to keep the conversations going. Ray invited us to attend a meeting at the DeFrank Center in San Jose tomorrow (Sunday) at 3pm, which we look forward to.

We headed back to Lisa and Bill's for another night. We spent dinner with Lisa, Bill, Alex, Bev, and David. We laughed harder than we have in a long time! Lisa fixed wonderful meals both nights... no wonder we're not losing weight! Thank you Lisa and Bill - pictures to come tomorrow!