May 10, 2014 -
Benicia, CA
The small, water-front city of Benicia is one of my favorite places, and I'm relatively new to the city and it's historic charm.
While making the brooch bouquet for our wedding, Casey and I often stopped in vintage stores searching for beautiful flower brooches. In early 2012 I had a friend in town visiting from Palm Springs, and we all decided to make a trip to Benicia, seeing online that they had lots of vintage, antique, and thrift stores. They had so much more than that! We walked for hours up and down their main street downtown (First Street.) We returned in 2013 and again walked up and down First Street, stopping for hot dogs and then beer as we watched the Kentucky Derby inside a cute little bar with two other friends. Our third visit to Benicia was last weekend, with a group of friends from Yelp for a great event: "East Bay Hood Hunters: Art & Cocktails in Benicia". Yelp plans to find a local Yelper from several East Bay cities, and host events in each city like this one, where they feature a couple of the local businesses and finish with food and drinks.
Our Saturday afternoon event started at Lindsay Art and Glass for a glass blowing demonstration. We had walked around this store in 2013 (I was actually their only Yelp review for the last year - five stars!)
http://amy81yelp.blogspot.com/2014/05/lindsay-art-glass.html It was amazing to see the two-man team create a beautiful, red vase out of liquid glass! After blowing and shaping it, the vase sits in a 900 degree "cooling" oven, to keep it from cracking. At the end they also blew a giant glass bubble, and kept blowing until it popped. (Video at the bottom - unfortunately, videoed sideways)
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| Blue Goose Antiques |
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| Blue Goose Antiques |
There are lots of ongoing events in Benicia. The annual Holy Ghost festival has taken place in Benicia for over 100 years, lots of tree planting events, and also various visual art and craft events. On this particular weekend, the city was promoting the
Benicia Art Walk, a self-directed walk through art galleries on First Street. We found some new galleries we wouldn't have noticed had we not see the "Art Walk" signs hanging out front.
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| Blue Goose Antiques |
We stopped in a few different vintage stores and one art gallery. The weather was perfect for strolling and we would have loved to walk through more, but our group was reconvening at The Rellik Tavern (
http://amy81yelp.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-rellik-tavern-benicia.html), a little ways further up First Street, so we didn't get to stop in as many places as we would have liked to but still enjoyed finding 3 new places: Blue Goose Antiques, The Foggiest Idea, and Dos Gatos Art Gallery.
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| The Foggiest Idea |
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| Dos Gatos Gallery |
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| The Foggiest Idea |
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| Dos Gatos Gallery |
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| Benicia Capitol building: California's third capitol |
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| First Street, Benicia |
Before heading to the Rellik Tavern for drinks with our friends, we walked into the Benicia Capitol State Historic Park building. We didn't pay to tour it, but we will definitely be back. The man at the desk was very friendly and gave us a brochure for a walking guide of Benicia and it's historic buildings and sites. Can't wait to come see them all!
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| Now a CA State Park |
Finally we made it to the last stop of our party!
The private room we were in was prefect for our group. Our hostess surprised us by ordering food. We had only planned on having a drink or two, but pizza and cheese arrived and it was too tempting to resist. Delicious!
Another wonderful Yelp event! I'm already looking forward to exploring more local neighborhoods. I'm sure there are tons of little places like Port Costa, Point Richmond, and even Benicia, that most people aren't very familiar with. Time to change that!
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| Bloody Mary at Rellik Tavern |
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| Margherita pizza at Rellik Tavern |
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| Fruit, cheese, and crackers at Rellik Tavern |
We were gifted tickets to the Ferrari Challenge by a friend who works at the track. We didn't go down on Saturday as we'd originally planned, but drove down on Sunday hoping to meet up with the group of friends who'd camped at the track over night. Unfortunately, they all had plans to leave for home pretty early Sunday afternoon, so as we were arriving, they were leaving. The Ferrari event was still a lot of fun to walk around. 
