Livermore’s seen big changes through the years. Take its premiere comics shop, Fantasy Books and Games.
“A guy who’s long, long gone started out selling used paperback books and some plaster-of-Paris figures his wife made. They started carrying comics in the back of the store in the 1970s, and that’s when I got involved,” says Bob Borden, the store’s current owner. “There wasn’t much going on in Livermore back then. It was definitely a little cow town.”
Nowadays, downtown Livermore is a commercial hub with fancy stores and a bustling main street lined with majestic fountains and flowers. But its rustic past steadfastly remains, as my partner and I discovered in a recent tour through town.
We started at Wingen Bakery, a new spot run by husband/wife duo Bryan and Aimee Wingen that has fantastic sourdough breads and pastries. The bright and airy interior is stocked with sacks of flour, rising cushions of dough and baked goods cooling on racks. Wingen has a rabid fan base – it opens at 8 a.m. and usually has a line out the door right after.
Sweet pastries, like cinnamon buns and fruit-and-cheese danishes, are excellent, as are the sourdough bagels, but having passed by a lovely artichoke garden in someone’s front yard (Livermore’s warm climate is great for growing vegetables), we order an artichoke sandwich. It’s stuffed with marinated veggies, olives, pine nuts and water buffalo mozzarella from Sonoma’s Double 8 Dairy, all squished between crusty sourdough and slathered with a grassy olive oil. We pair it with cups of strong coffee with a Third Wave tang and butter-rich cookies with gooey chocolate and perfectly square snowflakes of salt.
Around the corner is the Maple Street Flea, which happens on the second Sunday of the month barring foul weather or other circumstances (it’s best to check Craigslist). For a little street fair, it’s a good one. One vendor hand-sews denim jackets and patches, and others hawk vintage clothing, LPs and rock-band shirts. We consider purchasing a handbag from the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics but no – we didn’t like Georg Fluckinger’s performance in luge that year.
Fantasy Books and Games lives up to its self-given accolade of the “best comics, toys, games and manga store anywhere” with a huge inventory of modern favorites and historical curiosities. There are comics in which zombies try to eat Spider-Man, or Vincent Price meets Elvira, weird action figures like Bob Ross of “The Joy of Painting” (palette and brush included), Pokemon card packs going for $350 and a tribble-sized horde of Funko Pops ranging from Jackie Kennedy to LeBron James. “It’s so rare to find a store like this nowadays,” my partner comments.
“Hi my name is Charlie, I am not sturdy so please do not sit on me,” reads a sign on a horse statue outside Baughman’s Western Outfitters. The retailer has provided Western gear to Livermore since 1881 and is fun to explore, even if you’re not into the culture. Look in one direction, and it’s a floor-to-ceiling wall of jeans, so lofty it has a librarian’s ladder. Gaze another way, and you’re in hat country, with Stetsons and toppers from the John Wayne Collection. A back area stocks hundreds of cowboy boots, some small enough to fit newborns, as well as lassos and salves for horses and cattle. There’s also a rack of Western colognes with names like “Maverick” and “Man on Fire,” for those who want to smell like Raylan Givens.
A block away is a sex shop called Not Too Naughty, which seems out of place in this charming environment, but I suppose cowboys and cowgirls need lovin’, too. We leave downtown to see what the countryside has to offer.
Sycamore Grove Park is a chill place to experience 847 acres of nature and wildlife after, say, enjoying a glass of estate syrah from the Dante Robere winery directly across from its northern parking lot. (For a more challenging hike, try the mountainous Murietta Falls Trail at nearby Lake Del Valle.) The park is home to the third-largest grove of western sycamores in California, with bark as whitish-gray as old bone and canopies frizzled like branching electricity.
We pick an easy paved trail popular with bike-riding families that starts off along a vineyard. After a while, we discover vegetation-covered buildings that look like they were hit by a bomb. A Civil War veteran ran a wine and distilling operation here in the late 1800s; today, the ruins shelter roosting owls and the occasional prowling bobcat.
The sycamore-rich environment turns out to be great for our winged friends. Two giant hawks sail overhead, while a heron stands as still as a statue in the grass. Woodpeckers with red mohawks hammer away at opposite sides of the same branch – are woodpeckers the dim bulbs of the bird world, with all that head trauma? – and a talented little fellow in the branches mimics a whistling tea kettle, a croaking frog and then a clacking telegraph machine. We sit on a bench and note the memorial epitaph: “To rest, a bench of winter’s bark / Perhaps to watch a meadowlark.”
Back near the parking lot, we come across a cabinet filled with wooden blocks with holes drilled in them. It’s a “solitary bee box,” which is not for criminal bees but ones that prefer not to live in hives. There’s also a native garden with medicinal plants, where a sign invites visitors to rub a “Sticky Monkey Flower” used by native healers to treat burns. I do and, sure enough, my fingers are sticky for the rest of the day. (Thanks, sign!)
Da Boccery is a new restaurant down the road with outdoor and indoor bocce courts, “foot pool” (a hybrid of pool and football) and steel cages for tossing axes. There are pizzas and hearty pub foods galore, but we order an arugula salad with beets and oranges and succulent pastrami sliders – it’s run by the same people behind Sauced, and the kitchen smokes its own meat – and head on over to reenact medieval war.
It turns out an “ax” in this context is not a mighty killing machine that Gimli would use to slay orcs in “Lord of the Rings.” It’s a hatchet that was probably bought from Home Depot. Nevertheless, we have to sign medical waivers and wear closed-toe shoes. “If you drop the ax on your toe, it might hurt,” explains our throwing coach, a young woman who stays in the pen with us throughout. (Despite airborne weaponry, the whole thing feels quite safe.)
At the terminus of the cage is a wood wall with a target projected onto it. I notice a beam in the ceiling with a ton of notches – the ax equivalent of air balls.
“You want it to have one rotation into the board. Flick it a little bit, but not too much,” says our coach. I toss my ax and – thud – it bounces off the wood. “Hold it straight,” she suggests. Thud.
I ask if it helps to picture one’s enemy on the target. “People do that,” she says. “People ask if they can change the setting of the projector (to show a personal foe), sometimes.”
I envision the Eye of Sauron but it’s not quite working, so I switch to another fantasy scoundrel, Jar Jar Binks. Chunk! My ax sinks into the bullseye.
It turns out that hucking a hatchet is less about power and more about knowing when to release the ax on its downswing. For the rest of the evening, we have an enjoyable time tossing axes. Leaving the restaurant, I’m a little pumped up, sensing I’m a little more of a man – until the next morning, when my arms feel like wet spaghetti.
If You Go
Wingen Bakery: Open from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Thursday-Monday at 50 S. Livermore Ave. in Livermore; 925-495-4503, wingenbakery.com.
Maple Street Flea: Second Sunday of the month (barring bad weather) in the Bar Quiote lot at 112 Maple St. in Livermore.
Fantasy Books and Games: Opens daily at 11 a.m. at 2247 First St. in Livermore; 925-449-5233, fantasybooksandgames.com.
Baughman’s Western Outfitters: Opens at 11 a.m. Tuesday-Sunday at 2029 First St., Livermore; 925-447-5767, baughmans.com.
Dante Robere Winery: Enjoy wine on the winery patio with reservations on weekends or walk-in on Friday afternoons. 1200 Wetmore Road in Livermore; https://danterobere.com/reservations/
Sycamore Grove Park: Open daily from 7 a.m. to sunset at 1051 Wetmore Road in Livermore ($5 parking fee); 925-960-2400, larpd.org/sycamore-grove-park.
Da Boccery: Opens at 11 a.m. daily at 175 E. Vineyard Ave. in Livermore; 925-201-3353. Make activity and dining reservations at daboccery.com.