Visiting Old West Days in San Juan Bautista (California) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Old West Days in San Juan Bautista (California) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

San Juan Bautista is about 35 minutes outside of Monterey in California’s San Benito County.  Many people go to San Juan Bautista to see the bell tower at the San Juan Bautista Mission where Alfred Hitchcock filmed a scary scene from his movie Psycho.

The day my family set out for San Juan Bautista, the town was holding its Living History Day with re-enactments and activities for children.

We started our visit in San Juan Bautista Mission’s garden.  The brightly-colored tile benches with arabesque inlays against a white background are like something you would see in Andalusia (modern-day southern Spain).  There is a large rose garden, which smells wonderful in the heat.  Intertwined cactus plants invite painful touches.

Inside the Mission’s church, workers were preparing for a wedding, so we were able to see the whole church decorated with white garlands on the pews.  The lady at the store said they had two weddings and a baptism scheduled.  You can triple book when you have a community, who will ensure that the decorations will be nice for everyone.

We went to the museum to see the stagecoaches and blacksmithing materials.  The pony carriages were on break, so we went to the Plaza Hotel where they were holding Western dance lessons upstairs.  We were invited to dance by a “dance master.”  Only Florence and I took up the dance offer.

The first dance we did was called the “chinchu.”  The word meant “bed bug” in Spanish.  The dance originated in Watsonville, California – a Scottish town.  The dance master said it was a sort of Scottish jig.

“It goes like this,” the dance master started.  “First, you point your toes in four different directions and then you slide twice in the same direction.  After that, you point you toes on the other foot and slide twice in the other direction.  Then, you do the waltz and start again” were the instructions.

For the next dance, the dance master put a hat on me to designate me as a man and introduced Florence as a “bitty lady.”  The dance we did was called A Circle Waltz where you walked into the circle and had the women pass in front of you to get a new partner.  Four women passed in front and then you walked in two times before you did the waltz

The ballroom where we were dancing was huge.  It covered the entire top floor of a three-wing building.  We danced for a good hour.  Florence loved it, because everyone told her she was pretty.  She got twirled around a few times, too, by men in cowboy hats.

Meanwhile, I had to try leading as a man in waltz steps and got “Oh Dear” remarks for stepping on feet.  Florence ran back to me at the end of the dance to try on the top hat.

We lured Florence away from the grown-ups’ play with a pony carriage ride.   The carriage was like a stagecoach with open sides.  We circled the square in front of the Mission and waved at people.

On the way back to the car, I asked Florence what she liked best about the day.  She said she liked the Mission garden and the horse carriage ride.  I told her I liked the Western dances.  We both agreed that the bed bug dance was hard to do.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting the Tech Museum in San Jose (California) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Tech Museum in San Jose (California) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget


One of the advantages of going to graduate school in California’s Silicon Valley was that I learned where all of San José’s parking garages were downtown and their opening hours.

People might snicker at that comment, but parking can be a utopic dream if you arrive late in the day to San José.  There are public transportation options available where you can park outside the city and commute in to visit the Tech Museum.  You should plan to use them, if you cannot get into the city early.

Once the parking issue is out of the way, the Tech Museum of Innovation offers interactive exhibits around the themes of Body Metrics, Social Robots, The Tech Studio, Tech Silicon Valley Innovation Gallery, Tech and Biotech Gallery, Tech Exploration Gallery, and Tech Test Zone Gallery.

The Tech Museum was set up differently when my husband Laurent, daughter Florence, and I visited in 2003 due to different technologies that had been developed at the time.  However, our experience of how the Tech Museum engages visitors still gives a good picture of what a visit there will be like.

We began our visit by making webpages at one of the exhibits.  Then, Laurent and Florence had fun in the virtual room dodging shooting rays of light.  “Enter the video game,” I thought to myself.

We all made audio recordings, did an animation, got our pictures taken and doctored them with funny ears (Photoshop prototype?), and made a video with waves crashing in the ocean.  We printed out our work, which I later saved in family journals.

The next exhibits we visited were in the Earth Sciences and Space rooms.  They had an earthquake simulator exhibit where you could stand in a space and experience the magnitude of recent earthquakes.  Florence operated an underwater camera, got moved around in a “space chair,” and pretended she was operating a submarine with a simulator machine.

At noon, we walked across the street to an Italian restaurant.  Laurent and Florence ate pizza with chocolate mousse as dessert.  I had lasagna and a Caesar salad.  You can find almost any kind of restaurant in San José, which has attracted the world’s brightest to work in the city.

After lunch, we went back to the Tech Museum and did the “Innovation Silicon Valley and Beyond” exhibits.  We played with electricity exhibits.  We made circuits that lit up lights and made fans turn.  We measured static electricity, looked at microchips under a microscope, and looked at a computer wafer-making machine.

I liked “Life Tech: The Human Exhibit” as well.  I read about the human genome project and thought of how it could be used and misused.  A thermal video camera showed that Laurent and I both had cold noses.  (Our noses showed up as black blobs on a video screen.)  Laurent and Florence did a simulated wheelchair race as well as a simulated bobsled run her.  All the simulation exhibits ran using radio frequency identification (RFID).  I like the exhibit on how ultrasounds work, too.

We stopped in the store before we left.  Laurent bought an electricity kit that he was going to show Florence how to use.  He also bought a book of solutions to worst case scenarios, including how to deal with abduction by extraterrestrials.

I laughed when I saw that and looked for a solution to dealing with Hal, artificial intelligence gone bad.  I bought a book for Florence on how to solve algebra word problems.

Florence got some books on earthquakes and software; she liked the webpages exhibit and RFID operated ones.  I told her math was the language of science and that software lets you communicate with other people.  The Tech Museum of Innovation makes both of those subjects exciting; that alone is worth the price of admission.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Lassen Peak and the Lake Shasta Caverns in Northern California with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Lassen Peak and the Lake Shasta Caverns in California with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget



As part of a unit on volcanoes and tectonic plates, my daughter Florence's Waldorf School-inspired charter school planned a several night camping trip to Lassen Peak (Mount Lassen) and the Lake Shasta Caverns in Northern California near the Oregon and Nevada borders.

I was scheduled to ride up in SUV with one of the mothers who is a veteran of Boy Scout Outing Trips; her son was an Eagle Scout, the highest rank and badge you can attain.

My husband and I had obtained multi-sleeper tents, but I was going alone on the trip.  The tents went in the SUV along with the camping stoves, soup-making supplies for arrival, sleeping bags and mattresses, flashlights, and clandestine blueberry muffins.  (The muffins we were supposed to bring were bran, but kids and I do not really like those.)

The driver's daughter, Florence, and one of their school friends piled into the back seat.   They took out Brain Quest games and began quizzing each other.  I put a case of water between the driver and me.

Our SUV was the first to leave, and I was working as navigator in the pre-GPS days with the maps.  I also knew my way around San Francisco's highways from trips there.  I had a flashlight by me for when it got dark, so I could read the map.  We had walkie-talkies to communicate and the kids were in charge of those.  Driver-mom and I were laughing about the important information being communicated like who still had not packed their SUV, who had left, and who had taken the camp stoves.

Our first destination was the Geology Department at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.  We tramped up stairs and walked through corridor after corridor to arrive at the office of Dr. Elizabeth Miller.  We waited for everyone to arrive.  When they did, their teacher handed out the geology workbooks and drawings they had made at school.  Dr. Miller inspected all of them and made comments about them.  (Drawing is part of every theme at Waldorf Schools.)

Dr. Miller logistically placed all the children around the lab and had them look microscopes at slides of crystal formations.  I helped focus the microscopes and asked the kids to describe what they saw.  We all watched a film on plate tectonics, looked at a fault line map, and played with the department’s dogs.

Next we tramped through corridors, down stairs, and out to Stanford’s main quadrangle.  We visited Stanford’s Memorial Church.  I wondered if they held graduation ceremonies there.

Florence’s teacher took us to the geology library, so we could examine the crystal specimens there.  For me, the most interesting stone was varisite.  It looked like a geode with green sport drink crystals in the center.  Rhodocrosite with red-orange crystals shooting out from its sides was neat, too.

From Stanford, we drove into San Francisco and north to the Lassen National Park area.  Florence’s teacher and his son had arrived before us.  He knew the way, but our SUV had the tents and the arrival food.  Driver-mom got the arrival soup started.  Florence’s teacher and I got the tents pitched with help from the kids.

The soup was ready as people began arriving.  No one argued about lights out.  I did not sleep in a tent.  I put my sleeping bag and pillow out in the middle of the campsite.  I had no plans for sleeping too much, because I was stargazing. 

The clear mountain air lets you see things that you cannot see in a city like shooting stars.  I saw seven of them that night.  I also saw a flashing galaxy.  I had never seen stars truly twinkle before.  I felt like I could see different layers in the universe or was it just lack of sleep?

I helped the mom who was organizing breakfast with potato peeling and potato chopping for American fries.  The American fries tasted great with fried bacon, scrambled eggs, and coffee in the thin, mountain air.  Lassen Peak is 2,000 feet above sea level.

The first place we visited that day was the Lassen Volcanic National Park Center.  Four Native American groups had summer camps at Lassen Peak for hunting – the Atsugewi, the Yana, the Yahi, and the Maidu. 

The last of the Yahi Indian Tribe named Ishi (1860 - 1916) lived at Lassen and finished his days living at the anthropological museum at what is now the University of California – San Francisco.  The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (1876 - 1960) studied Ishi.  All of the Native American groups represented at Lassen were basket weaving cultures rather than pottery-making ones.

From the Visitor Center, we set out for Mount Lassen.  I discovered that I could not hike to the top of Mount Lassen, because I had not brought the correct shoes.  Poor planning – oh my!  I fell down just getting on the trail.  I was glad I fell at the bottom of Mount Lassen and not going up.  It is a bald peak with no trees.  You could roll down the entire mountain without stopping.

I volunteered to make lunch and dinner for everyone, since I could not hike.  Driver-mom did the same and laughed about disrupting her schedule.  Our kids plus their friend said they were going with us. 

We went back to the SUV and did our own tour around the park.  We went back to the Visitor Center to more fully examine the exhibits and went to the sulfur springs.  Bubbling boo that smells is how I qualified them.  Driver-mom took the kids on a nature walk like a Boy Scout mom could while I worked on salads, sandwiches, and cleaned fruit for dessert back at camp.

Lunch hour passed with no SUVs arriving.  I had the salads and sandwiches in coolers with ice, so they would be ready whenever everyone else came back.  I had brought some geology books and a book called The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition by Caroline Alexander along with me that the girls read.

Driver-mom and I got worried when dinner hour rolled around with no kids in sight.  We made soup again and were happy we had two meals ready when the other SUVs showed up in camp.  The kids had hiked to top of Lassen Peak.  They ate everything and we broke out the wild boar sausage and made that for the kids, too.  (We lived in wine country Monterey County, so wild boar sausage is an item you can get donated for field trips, if you know whom to ask.)

I told driver-mom to go have fun while I cleaned up.  The kids were eating roasted marshmallows and doing skits.  One of the mothers had a Japanese exchange student staying with her who did Japanese clown acts and was teaching the kids how to count and sing in Japanese.  The kids already knew some Japanese, because they had Japanese class at school. 

I slept under the stars again.  I was almost asleep when I heard snorting and grunting and bushes rustling beside me.  A wild boar had come into camp.

I jumped out of my sleeping bag and slapped it on the ground next to me and hit the picnic table, saying, “Scat!”

I succeeded in scaring away the boar and ran to our SUV to go to sleep.  Once I was inside the vehicle, I said to myself, “Where’s the pasodobles music?”  (Pasodobles is the music they play before bullfights in Spain.)

Saturday we set out for the Lake Shasta Caverns in Shasta, California.  The caverns were my favorite part of the trip.  Their website has a virtual tour to get an idea of what the place is like.  The Shasta Caverns are limestone caverns with the mineral calcite making formations, which are 250 million years old.

It was interesting to see where stalactites and stalagmite had grown together.  Some of the caves had what is known as cave coral in them.  Water used to be in these caves.  The water level has changed over the course of millions of years.

For me, the most interesting features of the caves were the helictite formations.  These look like crystal spaghetti formations.  Karst formations were there, too.  These are cracks in the rocks that let water through and form rock formations.

After this visit, we took the kids swimming in nearby pool.  They had mud baths at the pool, too.  I thought the kids would be in Never, Never Land mud bath forever. 

The next day, we broke down camp.  The boys all asked me about the wild boar. 

“It’s maybe better to sleep in a tent or cabin,” I said.

Driver-mom and I stopped and bought the kids in our SUV bear claw sticky buns and orange soda on the way home.  I enjoyed reliving the trip through the girls’ wrap-up conversation and commentary.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget


Monterey, California’s biggest tourist draw is its aquarium.  Lines queue up to get in, which is one of the reasons why I became a field trip chaperone when my daughter Florence’s Waldorf School went for a visit.  Going to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with a class of nine- and ten-year-olds allows you to fully appreciate the Aquarium I think.

We all started our trip to the Aquarium by walking from the Pacific Grove Gate to Pebble Beach where the school was located to walk downhill to Cannery Row in Monterey.  The kids were bouncing along and talking loudly all the way there.  By the time we arrived, they had all slowed down to adult speed and were quiet at the entrance to the sardine-canneries-turned-aquarium on breezy Monterey Bay.

The fifth graders split into two groups – the sea otters and the octopae.  I was in charge of the octopus group.  The octopus kids were not happy.

“We don’t want to be an octopus,” they said almost in unison as our Aquarium guide looked on in distress.

“An octopus is one of the smartest animals in the ocean,” I said.  “They squirt ink at their enemies and blind them, so they can away from them without getting hurt,” I continued.  That statement seemed to mollify them, but I noticed that the kids “lost” their badges during the course of our field trip.  I wanted to be in charge of the sharks on the next Aquarium visit.

A retired schoolteacher was our guide.  She was trying not to laugh as I dealt with the octopus issue.  She started our trip by describing an ecosystem and food webs – both relate how nature is related and interlocking in nature.  Disturbing one of the parts has an effect on the others. 

We received this introduction at the Inner Bay Exhibit, which has a towering and twirling kelp forest in its tank.  The kids swiveled as the guide spoke, helping them use more than one sense to retain the information being imparted to them.

I asked about an interesting fish there called a Sheep’s Head fish.  It was black on each end and orange in the middle.  That is what the male fish looks like.  If the male fish is taken out of the vicinity of the female fish, the orange-colored female fish will change into a male.  The Aquarium guide said the workers had discovered this when they took the male fish out of the tank and the female fish began to change into a male fish.

After this explanation, we then tramped up the metal stairs to the exhibits with star fish, which our guide said are also called sea stars.  Sea otters eat sea stars.  Sea stars  liquefy their food before eating it.  The guide gave us a sheet with images of the foods that are in the sea otter’s food web: abalone, crab, sea cucumber, pisaster star, sea urchin, and bat star.  I told the kids I would hold the handouts and give them back to them when we got back to school. 

Next we went into the Outer Bay Exhibit.  Bigger animals live out there as well as jellyfish.  The kids liked the orange jellyfish that bobbed up and down against a blue- lit background.  Our guide told us that sea turtles eat jellyfish.  She said that sea turtles sometimes mistake plastic bags for jellyfish and eat the bags, which “can be fatal.”

“What does ‘fatal’ mean?” one of the octopus kids asked.

“It means turtles die if they eat plastic bags,” I said, sparing the guide from shocking the innocent childhood of Waldorf students.

After that we went into the viewing room with the “tuna tank.”  All the kids lay down on the floor to watch the high stress, Type-A tuna dart about.  They all “oohed and aahed” when they hammerhead shark slowly swam amongst the tuna.

The guide said her tour was over.  I was left with the octopus kids for another two hours.  I suggested that we go see the sea otters being fed.  We went down the metal steps and across exhibit halls to see the sea otters being fed for half an hour until everyone got bored.  (I think they were all happy to be an octopus after that.)

My next suggestion was, “Would you like to pet the manta rays?”

“Yeah!”

“What are those?”

“Don’t manta rays sting”

“Where are they?”

“Follow me,” I said, feeling like the Pied Piper.

We tramped downstairs and back up and around the back of the Aquarium to the huge pool of whirling manta rays.  (My family had a family membership to the Aquarium, so I knew where everything was.)  We all put our hands in the water and let the manta rays flit and slither by them.  The manta rays are slimy, which necessitated hand washing before and after using the bathroom, our next tour stop.

After that I took the fifth-grader octopus group to the Splash Zone.  The Splash Zone was set up for preschoolers.  None were there, which made this a good stop.  The Splash Zone has slides, games, photo-op stands (everyone got photos taken as a penguin), and the penguin exhibit.  The penguins are the monkeys of the Aquarium.  I took the kids there to see the penguins.

I love penguins.  They thrash around when they swim, stand up and flap their flippers to dry off, and bite each other’s behinds when they are angry.

There was a little auditorium in front of the exhibit tank.   The Aquarium did a show to illustrate the differences between a rainforest parrot and a penguin.  My daughter Florence was dressed up as a penguin and her classmate “nemesis” was dressed as a parrot.

They were asked to make up some lines based on what they had learned.

“Penguins are ugly.”

“Parrots smell.”

“Penguins eat turds.”

“Parrots just repeat things.”

I am sure the Aquarium staff had them say some other things, but laughter does increase knowledge retention according to some academic researchers.

The only exhibit we did not visit was the ocean bird exhibit.    The ocean bird exhibit area is small and better suited for families I thought.  The Aquarium’s films about the deep sea creatures it is studying in the Monterey Bay Canyon are best seen as a family I thought, too.  The Monterey Bay Canyon is deeper than the Grand Canyon and is just as interesting as the moon to explore I think.

I have always enjoyed visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Permanent exhibits and took visitors to see them during the thirteen years that I lived in Monterey.  The overall experience of visiting the Aquarium makes you feel as if you have been on a diving trip.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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