Sam McManis

GRASS VALLEY – She didn't call me "Hon." This was disappointing. All waitresses of a certain age and sunny dispositions use that sobriquet with diners. It's in the job description, isn't it?

She walked down Telegraph Avenue in this city's grungy-cum-trendy Temescal neighborhood, a little overdressed in a black trench coat and blue scarf on a sun-saturated late winter afternoon.

Flames lick the crisp morning sky, as they've done for decades from two cauldrons along Highway 89, midway between Truckee and Tahoe City. They don't quite reach the Olympic rings looming from the twin-towered entrance to Squaw Valley USA, but their symbolism burns strongly.

You can expect to see most anything at stylized Mission District dive bars, known for their high quirk quotient. Habitués cultivate aggressive nonchalance and need something truly unusual, just short of cattle-prod shocking, to get them to look up from their PBRs and pay attention.

EL CERRITO – Neither a bookstore nor a library, but something of a utopian hybrid, the Bay Area Free Book Exchange almost makes a guy feel sheepish and guilty, as if he's getting away with something not entirely above-board.

The incongruity amazes and appalls in equal measure. Smack dab in the middle of Fisherman's Wharf, this city's bright and shiny tourist mecca, sits a shop that caters to our dark side, our suspicious minds and worst impulses.

BURLINGAME – A man who has dedicated much of his life to the acquisition and lavish display of 5-inch plastic candy dispensers that shoot out pellets from a tracheotomy-scar opening probably doesn't give a whit what you might think of such an endeavor.

SAN FRANCISCO – Irrational, I know, but it bummed me out, in a breaking-the-spell sort of way, when two tour buses pulled up at the recently remodeled Lands End Lookout visitors center and dumped off a gaggle of slumping, weary tourists.

Frankly, I'd rather have a colonoscopy, sans anesthesia, than ever again dine at a T.G.I. Friday's type of faux-friendly place.

KEENE – A dozen teenage boys, nearly all Latino, spent the better part of a recent morning in a darkened room here at the Cesar Chavez National Monument, watching a film starring a man who died before they were born.

BORREGO SPRINGS – It had been a long drive on one of those lonely rural roads and, you know, a guy can get worn out and start seeing things that may or may not be there. Highway hypnosis, my high school driver's ed teacher called it.

SAN FRANCISCO – Camp had unexpectedly decamped from the stages of this most flamboyant of cities about a decade ago, and at the worst possible time, too – the holiday season.

Enough with those effete, raised-pinky wine- tasting tours.

SANTA CRUZ - Tempting as it may be to hum "Truckin' " while visiting the Grateful Dead archive at UC Santa Cruz – you know, "what a long, strange trip it's been …" – the exhibit itself really isn't that long nor all that strange.

So my first heinous breach of tattoo etiquette may have gone unnoticed, or politely ignored. I believe I mistakenly called Madame Chinchilla, grand dame of the Triangle Tattoo Studio and Museum along with loyal partner Mr. G., Madame Chowchilla.

HOPLAND – My pathological affinity for roadside attractions continues unabated. An intervention may be needed soon but, for now, no one can stop me from stopping at every quirky spot with an odd sign or kitschy figure serving as a come-on.

SAN FRANCISCO – In a funky, exposed-pipe room on what used to be part of the San Francisco Chronicle building's first floor – hard times, audible sigh, for newspapers having to sell off space – a loosely affiliated group of writers gathered to read from their work.

There are annoying tourists, and then there are annoying Fisherman's Wharf tourists. Even worse, deserving of a special place in Dante's burning circle of travel hell, are the annoying Fisherman's Wharf tourists riding Segways.

One of this job's perks – or hazards; you decide – is that it can trigger long- repressed childhood memories.

Far and away the most notorious traitor ever to trod on Sacramento soil, a truly despicable character bent on undermining all that was right and good in the world – no, Kings fans, we're not talking about a Maloof brother – is back to haunt our lives once more.

On the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Bancroft Way, someone tagged an eggshell-white wall of the American Apparel store with the sobriquet "Pablo Diablo" in swirling, bloated script. Farther up Bancroft, a redwood fence at the YWCA building has been adorned with slashing white letters all but indecipherable.

GRASS VALLEY – No need, really, to make that long trek down the coast to Pacific Grove or San Simeon. No need to fight freeway traffic to Berkeley, either.

Another late-summer Friday night here on the edge of the continent has brought out all the regulars.

Sad to say that, lo these many years, the field of crypto-zoology still has not advanced enough to give us definitive and irrefutable proof of the existence of a hirsute, hulking humanoid known in these parts as Bigfoot.

SAUSALITO – Think "houseboat" and "Marin County," and the mind automatically reverts to this default- setting image, so hideously 1970s:

They glisten and glint in the kilnlike Mojave summer sun, a forest of emerald, amber and ocean-blue starkly offsetting the unwavering beige desert canvas.

This whole phenomenon was started, as with so many wacky leisure-time pursuits, by meticulously scruffy hipsters in San Francisco as an excuse to drink too much beer, wear too few clothes and snarkily relive their supposedly idyllic childhoods.

Look down when you walk in. That wood floor on which you trod in your squeeky Crocs or Nikes is the same that once supported the spur-studded boot heels of 49ers clomping through.

Paralyzed by a surfeit of choice, I stood glazed-eyed and slack-jawed before the almost obscene bounty and variety of almonds spread out before me.

HILLSBORO, Ore. – You come a-callin' on Bruce Campbell at his humble abode in this exurb west of Portland, and you don't know where to knock.

MOKELUMNE HILL – Some days, don't you just want to chuck it all – the road-rage traffic jams, the soul-sucking cubicle job – and leave the big city to head for the hills, maybe buy a historic Gold Rush hotel and become a kindly old innkeeper, à la Bob Newhart in a cardigan?

TAHOE CITY – The little dude, parents in tow, came clomping up the stairs to the second floor of the Gatekeeper's Museum to see the new exhibit "Ursus Among Us," all about bears in the Lake Tahoe region.

Two days after the fact, I still bear the faint bodily traces from the slowest 5K I've ever run. Or perhaps it should be called a 5C run. As in, five colors.

I am on a morbid mission and, frankly, I am a little spooked. I am driving east on Highway 46 from Paso Robles toward the junction with Highway 41 – all for the sole purpose of visiting the site of James Dean's fatal car accident.

SANTA BARBARA – He may not be too stoked by the comparison, but it's meant with fondness and more than a little envy:

ALAMEDA – The minute I walked through the door and caught sight of a row of pinball machines, all gleaming metal and burnished wood and flashing lights, I was transported to my awkward 'tween years – that less-than-halcyon time of acne and inferiority, raging hormones and daily disappointments.

We had done that particular dance that anonymous museumgoers do – step back, shuffle over, mumble vague apologies, trade embarrassed smiles – before I finally felt compelled to speak.

The occasion is Secession Day, traditionally the last Sunday in June, when residents in this no-stoplight burg puff out their community chest and fly the Great Republic of Rough and Ready flag proudly to relive the storied, three-month stretch of 1850 when they told the U.S. of A. where to stick it.

VIRGINIA CITY, Nev. – So much of this propped-up Old West town simply tries too hard to be realistic, as if creaking, warped wooden walkways and scruffy men moseying along in full period costume, right down to the clacking spurs, could truly plunge a visitor back in time.

The weather-beaten sign out front proclaims "The Henry Miller Memorial Library … Where Nothing Happens."

Wherever you have a road, it seems, you have roadside attractions. Here in the redwoods, they line Highway 101 like so many squashed squirrels.

You've got to be exceedingly lactose tolerant to do this job, but even I was starting to feel a little nauseated by the cheesiness of pulling off Highway 101 merely to drive my car through a redwood tree.

Hundreds of slimy, croaking bullfrogs, accompanied by their less slimy but equally exhortative human "jockeys," will pounce on Angels Camp next weekend and take a giant leap at local fame, a modicum of fortune and maybe even inspire some modern-day Mark Twain to wax prosaic.

Rest easy, this is not another rant about how there's a Starbucks, sometimes two, on every corner. That complaint itself has become as vexatious as the coffee company's ubiquitous signage (in Freight Sans Black, for you typeface freaks) on strip malls far and wide.

Something about the towering presence of redwoods, those hulking and massive trunks, along the Avenue of the Giants can make a guy hungry.

Round and round they go, bobbing and weaving and crashing into one another like bumper cars at an amusement park. The sound of skate wheels on polished wood is a sustained grind, muted only somewhat by the murmur of the crowd and the patter of the play-by-play announcers echoing off the walls.

Landlocked as it is, this verdant, wine-soaked town surrounded by lines of vines seems an odd location for a museum exhibit commemorating the sinking of the Titanic, which happened 100 years ago today.

In a moment, we will turn over control of today's column to Miss Odessa, the delightful dowager docent of Old Sacramento, the prim and proper queen of the underground tours, the self-styled Southern belle transplant with just a bit of a gossipy streak.

This city, so justifiably smitten with its historic landmarks and tourist haunts, likes to go for the grand gesture, the bold statement, the self-consciously arty design that trumpets, "Woo-hoo, look at us."