No matter when you start this tour (joining it with the morning tour or picking just this one alone), be prepared for a full experience.  Alameda has much to recommend it for a small town.

Starting on Park St., at a local cafe, you’ll take a pleasant ride down a street of more Victorians until you hit Crown Memorial Beach, allowing yourself  a little bit of a breather to eat or rest after lunch. Perhaps you can take your cue from the many birds you’ll see flying overhead, our feisty friends, the fowl, adept at alternating stillness with flight.

Our second stop will be the antique (read that to be 20 years+ in American) flea market to collect some items for a visually memorable keepsake for the day. As you wander the stalls, be on the look out for small, reflective, quirky or regionally riveting items, receptive to ideas that come to you. Next, make your way for a quick ride through and glimpse into a houseboat community and local arts center just in time out to create your masterpiece at a quiet but restful local park.   Some beautiful music will be provided to lead you into a more contemplative mood as you focus on some interesting collages and then on your own creations. The idea is to allow yourself to really settle in!

We’ll recommend some fabulously memorable tropical drinks at one of two trendy hangouts with great music and if you happen to time it right, share with you the details of a second fridays only art walk, to really come to know the local vibe.  So if you’re craving a bit of an island experience, let’s together fill this one to the brim.  Aloha!

In the future, we hope to develop a modest self-running social network to help facilitate conversation between creative tour hosts and out-of-town visitors.  Check back with us about our progress.  Thank you for your interest and your support.

Giving Feedback on Existing Tours

We welcome suggestions for improving all our mobile tours since your excitement and ours will really feed each other. After all, the goal to bring artmaking to the center of our days is mutual, right!  Of course, we are also building our foundation and while we anticipate more output from your partnership in the future, at this juncture, we can only offer you a small number of tours to sample. As a result, please be patient with our evolution. Furthermore, since the whole area of mobile tours is an experiment, Take Me Bay Area will most likely benefit from learning how you respond to the experience of using Take Me Bay Area via your mobile device as your guide. We’ll be listening closely to your ideas.

So, do let us know what works and doesn’t. Use the contact form under “Contact” on this site and submit your suggestions. We are interested in feedback at all stages of development. Thank you for stopping by and for caring to make this a positive experience for those who follow.

Contributing Content to a Tour

Interested in contributing suggestions and content for a creative tour — even one we haven’t thought of yet? Great! First of all, you’ll want to sign up. Submit the form on this website, letting us know the contribution you would like to make.

At this time, we cannot promise we will implement a tour you suggest but we want to make a good effort and explore it with you. After you register, familiarize yourself with our content so far, and then, let’s set up a time to meet. Since Take Me Bay Area is not about amassing the largest number of mobile tours but rather developing experiences that are personable, rich in content, and lead you to quality resources afterwards as well, it is important that you support the core idea. After that, we may need you to make yourself available for an interview, provide access to a person or group who would make the tour especially worthwhile, or simply discuss how you see your tour idea being of interest.  In all these ways, you’ll be helping us evangelize the idea of mobile tours and helping us stay connected to what feels exciting and useful about your community. 

As a tour contributor, we look for ideas about special creative pursuits in your neighborhood and strategies for making these tours memorable and fun. This may be something that you, yourself, do creatively that you would like to share with a visiting audience, or something that you are aware of that happens in a Bay Area location. We reserve the right to accept or not accept submissions if it doesn’t fit the larger vision of the site, in terms of time, type or emphasis.

To get started, we ask that you first register, and then, contact Take Me Bay Area directly.  We’ll follow up with some guidelines for contribution, and let you know if we are interested in proceeding. Again, thank you for your interest in making Take Me Bay Area a creative, can’t-be-missed adventure!

Co-Hosting/Co-Leading a Tour

Co-hosting a tour is different from simply contributing content or allowing yourself to be interviewed for a tour. It is actually co-leading it, which will mean allowing yourself to be taped, participating in the section of the tour, and having a spontaneous interchange as we share what we want our visitors to see. It may also mean sharing your work and the time it takes to capture the uniqueness of or a few tips on what your idea can offer. We will also ask that you agree to follow the structure of the tours to convey consistency and branding of Take Me Bay Area, and respect the rights inherent in an co-creation agreement.

In terms of guidelines, if you are interested in co-creating a tour, and we give you the go-ahead, pitch us by submiting a proposal, outlining what you would like this tour to be. Two extra steps will be involved. You will need to arrange for studio time with me to narrate introduction to the tour, including having the mobile tour guide photo taken for this segment. And secondly, make time available for review. The show will be put up in the following staging area before it goes live. This is to remind you of the material covered so, if you have any final ideas or additional visuals you would like to share, they can be added to the website later as a downloadable resource to cover it. In many cases, it won’t be practical to redo a video segment.

Interested In exploring further? Great! Contact magellie@gmail.com.

But this is a woman’s tour, and to experience the breadth of that creativity, we’ll get acquainted with some known and lesser known artists. We’ll check out Julia Morgan’s incredible architectural innovations, the striking clay forms of potter Beatrice Wood, the uplifting advice on how to build one’s creative capacities from author, Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way), and the edible garden of Alice Waters. We’ll also interview professionals who coach creative people, and find out some not so obvious strategies for making creativity a part of our daily lives.

We’ll end the day with a creative exercise to make sure our time during the tour as well as beyond it is well spent, that is, is lived creatively and well. A promise, not to be broken, on this tour, for sure.

Blue is the warmth of the day, the welcoming water on the lake and the color of the night sky. It’s subtle hues often soothe, are varied in mood, surprisingly deep and deliciously friendly. So, whatever you see, have the courage to take out your brushes, because the Paint the Town Blue is ready to begin.

On this tour, we want you to feel the elements. Although we will be painting soon (or taking mobile pictures to remind us of what we will paint further in the day), we’ll need first to prepare. We’ll recommend a portable supply kit that will keep things simple, and visit a number of scenic places on the front end before we immerse ourselves in this tour’s creative craft — painting a series of postcards reflecting our various moods throughout the day.

Our first stop is Lake Merritt, where we’ll have the option to rent a gondola or a canoe or a rowboat to get our spirit going. Sometimes, you have to get a little distance and adopt a different view point to see something fresh. Then we’ll view a brief instructional demo on your mobile about what creates excitement in a painting,  followed by our suggestions to get you started with the first of many postcard painted scenes.

Next, we’ll catch breakfast at an inviting place near the lake, and follow that up with a visit to one of two parks, choosing a spot to capture the quaintness of the area and the park before us. We’ll circle back up Telegraph, briefly stopping at the Fox Theatre for some further inspiration, before we catch dinner outdoors at a courtyard restaurant or have a comforting drink at a tantalizing Moroccan spot that will round out this day’s painterly explorations. You’ll be excited when you look back at your signature series of travel postcards that can serve as both a meaningful memory and gift.

For those who feel the day is not yet done, we’ll provide a special recommendation to help you connect up with the art scene at Uptown, a night time art exhibit/First Friday walk that will be a pleasant finale to your visit to the neighborhood. We’ll part our tour description now with this: Painting the town red may have been the hottest thing going, but an experience of blue is deliciously cool and convincingly captivating — at least in our case, we hope we’ve convinced you! So, be prepared to have a truly lovely, out-in-the-elements tour!

And while you might parrot the idea that like in all small towns, there’s not really that much to do, you’d be wrong. Totally. And nothing for the artist? Well, look again.

On this tour, we’re going to share with you a full day’s worth of creative activity if you combine it with Mobile Tour Fourteen,  and still, an involving amount of time if you don’t. We’ll point you to a delicious, leisurely weekend breakfast and then have you explore Alameda by bike. On the way, we’ll cross over the main drag (Park Street), passing some really lovely Victorians and tree-lined streets, then collect what we need from the local crafts store for our art pack of the day.  We’ll then pedal over to Bay Farm Island, where we’ll ride along the shoreline, and by lagoons, and pick a spot of our choosing along these shores or in a park nearby.

Our project will be ink and watercolor sketching and we’ll learn from a local travel sketch artist some of the joys of “plein air” sketching, important things to know to get started, some insider tips,  and why this activity gets to be so heartfelt once you begin.

From here, we’ll ride back to Park Street and point you to local specialties like a tasty peach mojito or a lemonade lavender refresher, a philly cheese steak, or great health food choices over at the Alameda Marketplace.  Hot or cold weather riders will appreciate the options here.  Then we’ll wrap up our day with a walk on the beach.

Hey, not bad for a small town, huh!   Happy Sketching!

And when you’re a kid, there’s nothing the least bit cynical in saying, “hey, it’s all some crazy game.” So, just for this tour, I want to indulge, become a kid again. Get lost in playing like there’s no tomorrow. We’ll check out some games that are really well-crafted and local favorites, go to a comic book museum, see some ancient mechanical objects, visit a milk shake bar. We’ll make some recommendations for charming, handmade toys to bring back home. We’ll do it all.

You game? Thought so. Have a kid with you or one back home you want to delight? Well, this is the way to go. Let’s do it!

In this tour however, we will be taking back the challenge, and consciously exercising selective perception. What are we choosing? What aren’t we? How does that define our point of view? We’ll discuss authors who talk on the subject to help us extend the way we think and therefore see, as well as explore some local photographers who are doing some particularly interesting work.

Of course, we can’t let a perfectly good day go by without snapping away, so we’ll board the ferry in Oakland, where we will have many opportunities to take shots of people gathering, both at the ferry coming and going. We’ll be visiting the Ferry building with all its shops, restaurants and activities, and challenge ourselves to find interesting points of view.

We’ll also visit SF MOMA and Center for Creative Photography to end the day as creatively as it began. If it’s Friday evening on the ferry from San Francisco to Oakland, you’re in for a special treat. So, hot shots, choose to see so we can see you on the tour!

Then, we’ll talk to some local fashion artists who describe for the rest of us how the fashion design world works and what’s involved in getting one’s designs onto shelves.

We’ll round out the day by visiting some truly hip styles at some trendy boutiques on Union Square.

Hope it’s your style. Here’s to a great San Francisco fashion tour.

In this tour, we’ll get acquainted with these poets and their texts as we walk the street, and lead you to resources that you will find informative about the poetic spirit, here in the East Bay. You’ll also hear some favorites, as read by my local poet friends. They will talk about how they go about writing poems, how they get kids excited about poems, and what makes certain poems really great, as they take us to the spaces and places that inspire them.

As the tour progresses, we’ll point out a few local ‘insider’ places to hang out and hear performances with indisputable charm. Expect a pleasing musical and comedy story improvisation scene, as poetry is really all about rhythm. And given these two areas are populated by a highly educated citizenry, be prepared for folks, close to U.C. Berkeley, who can’t really ever get quite enough.

Are you listening? Well, good. See you on the tour!