Have you visited the Adobe Creek trail located at the shoreline between Palo Alto and Mountain View, or have you been there during the golden hour? The sky turns into a canvass, encompassing everyone in this natural wonder every day.

The Golden Hour walk is meant for people to meet their social neighbors, to experience the magic moment of day turning into night together. Break the ice by a social walk in a local place of interest, then group dinner together to open the weekend. This specific one is also the first of 3 events for social around the festival.

Downtown Mountain View is also having an Art & Wine festival over the Spe 12-13th weekend, we organize this Golden Hour session around the festival weekend, on Friday Sep 11th.
https://www.mvartwine.com

The walk is also meant for local community builders, who are willing to take actions, to experience such an effort to do so, and join us. We plan to build local team across regions, so you can partner up, and hold such social walks in cities nearby to you, in rotation. You get the chance to work with different partners, at different locations, across town. A different builder type social.

The Adobe Creek trail extends deep into the bay. It is a well known hiking trail, with rich marine life on the sides. To the west you can see sunset over the rolling dunes of Palo Alto's Byxbee park. To the south, you can see the Santa Cruz mountains, and get how Mountain View gets its name.

You will also see people setting up booths for the coming festival in downtown, there will also be festival volunteers joining us for the social before group volunteering in the festival. For that, you can check out our festival volunteering event. We would host a festival social mixer on Sat afternoon.
https://www.meetup.com/townflame/events/313120689
https://www.meetup.com/townflame/events/316321592

We will take the same trail to and back. So if you arrive late, just meet us on the trail. Or join us in group dinner social in downtown. Friday evening's downtown is nice, a good stroll down Castro street.

Schedule:
Location: Shoreline Scenic Lookout, the wooden deck by the road side. Adobe Creek Loop Trailhead
5:45pm Meet & greet
6pm Heading out.
7pm Back
7:20pm Downtown Mountain View group dinner social

Parking:
Casey Forebay Street Parking
2629b Terminal Blvd, Mountain View, CA 94043

Or Park in the parking lot of Shoreline park, then walk over by the lake.

Image credit to Zankhna, taken during our last Golden Hour walk on bay trail, Sunnyvale.

Flower Power -- A new way of Attention Interaction.

Come to experiment another social format with us, young professionals mixer in community festivals.

"Attention is all you need", which is also true in the mixer connection business.

We as a community org has been deeply involved in community affairs. We have attended almost all major festivals in SF, and local ones. Our Golden Hour walk footprints are extending from Stanford to Mountain View, to Sunnyvale & Santa Clara, and beyond. In connecting up these social neighborhoods on the ground, we have seen all kinds of active social people, lively with different characteristics at each location.

So there are great opportunities out there, waiting for you to explore, to find and be found. Attention could be received, far and beyond, besides this small event, across the wide and grand community space as well.

So in this mixer, we are going to introduce a new format of "attention" social, for all those that are willing to try out, while building this "social neighborhood" with us across different cities.

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In our golden hour walks, we ran into a lot of people fresh in town. In our other events, we also came to know that a lot of our alumni are single.

Most of our members are working professionals, who would be busy with career all day, so social occasions could be limited. Thus we are trying addressing this issue by experimenting with social mixer in community festivals, for young professionals, our version.

We are not the professionals in this domain, so we won't guarantee gender ratios etc.. What we can is to provide you an interaction rich environment, by our experience organizing festival social in the city, and golden hour walks in local, in a vibrant festival setting. You will have a good chance to get familiar with other participants, and enough occasions to chat with people you are interested, both individually and in group settings.

Bonus round is that we also have a large volunteer body active in the festival, as you can see from our event listing. So at the end of the program, you also have chance to have group coffee / dinner with the volunteers, extending your social circle once more.

And our program doesn't end with the festival, see all the events we organize? You can invite your new acquaintances to attend follow up events together, so further opportunities to get to know each other better. Of course, we would always welcome you to volunteer or lead walks with us. Imagine that, leading a troop side by side, doing good, be the center of the attention, time & again. Your fate, your call.

As we noted, Mountain View Arts & Wine is the largest around, 160k people in two days. And afternoon 3-5pm would be the busiest hours. Come to enjoy a great civic scene if not to make friends.

So here is the schedule:
Location: Starbucks, Castro street, downtown Mountain View
3:45pm Meet
4pm Let's walk & chat, along the golden hour route.
4:30pm 2nd round of networking
5pm Walk back, visit the festival in your freshly formed groups.
6pm Optional regroup
7pm Optional group coffee or dinner with festival volunteers.

We may also play some fun flower tricks, by what we learned from fund raising volunteering in Stern Grove festival. Check that out on site.

"海上生明月，天涯共此时"

"As the bright moon rises above the ocean, we share this very moment from all corners."

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There is a way to marvel at the beauty of the city, and that of life.
There is a way to turn a group of strangers, into a group that have sweated and laughed with you together, sharing the bread.

We started this "Road to" format in North Beach festival, improved it for the Japantown Nihonmachi (thanks Tony), now we are doing it again for the Autumn Moon Festival, Chinatown, on Sat. Sep 19th. It involves a walk through city landmarks, then visit the festival in small groups, then regather for a group coffee/tea/dinner together.

Autumn Moon Festival is the Chinese Thanksgiving, a time for family gatherings. Its iconic food is the moon cake. It would be celebrated for two days in Chinatown, starting with a parade at 11am Sat..
https://www.moonfestival.org/

Chinatown sits in a bowl underneath two of the best hills in San Francisco. So we're not going to show up at the Moon Festival. We're going to walk down into it from above.

We start with coffee on Polk. We climb a hidden wooden lane that most people who live in this city have never found. Twenty minutes later you're standing on a terrace looking at Coit Tower, Alcatraz, the Bay Bridge — and straight below you, the rooftops of Chinatown. That's the destination. You get to look at it before you walk into it.

Then we cross the ridge to Nob Hill, stop at the winding house where the actual cable car cables turn, cut through Grace Cathedral's courtyard, and come out at the corner where California Street drops away toward the bay with cable cars grinding up it. We descend into Chinatown, stop inside a church built in 1854 by Chinese laborers out of granite shipped across the Pacific, and then walk under the Dragon Gate into a street closed to cars, packed with lion dancers, mooncakes, and several thousand people.

By the time we get there you'll know the people standing next to you. That's the actual product. The festival is the reward. And needless to say, that Chinatown itself is a district rich in culture and SF history.

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## The arc

11:30 — Fueling Station Cafe, 2436 Polk St (Polk & Union). Coffee, introductions, nobody left standing alone at the counter. Grab something — we're on our feet for a while.
12:00 — Step off. Ten minutes of real climb east up Union.
12:15 — Macondray Lane. A hidden wooden-plank lane between the buildings. Single file, so you talk to whoever's next to you.
12:35 — Ina Coolbrith Park. The view, and our Friend Circle — a short structured round on the terrace so you leave knowing the people you walked with, not just their faces. Group photo. Then we point at Chinatown down below and go get it.
1:00 — Cable Car Museum. Free, indoors, and genuinely great. The machines that run the whole system are right there spinning.
1:15 — Huntington Park & Grace Cathedral. Nob Hill's front lawn. Second join point lands here.
1:40 — Mason & California. The postcard corner. Look east and the whole city drops toward the Bay Bridge.
2:05 — Old St. Mary's. Cool, quiet, and older than almost everything around it.
2:15 — The Dragon Gate. We gather under it, take the photo, and walk in together.
2:25 — Grant Avenue. Lion dancing, mooncakes, food stalls, six blocks of closed street.
3:45 — Regroup at Portsmouth Square, one block off the noise.
4:00 — The alleys. Waverly Place, the temple balconies, Ross Alley and the fortune cookie factory. Ninety seconds off Grant and it's a completely different city.
4:30 — Dinner in Chinatown. Big round tables. Optional but strongly encouraged — this is where the day actually lands.

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## Three ways to join

You can't be late to this event. You can only be early for the next door.

1. The Full Road — 11:30 AM, Fueling Station Cafe, 2436 Polk St. The whole arc: the lane, the terrace, both hills, the descent, the gate.
2. Mid-Join — 1:15 PM, Huntington Park (California & Taylor, by the fountain). Skip the climb, catch the second half and the walk into Chinatown. Look for the TownFlame marker.
3. The Gate — 2:15 PM, the Dragon Gate at Grant & Bush. Join for the festival, the alleys, and dinner.

Each door has a hard clock. We move on time.

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## What you're actually getting

Every TownFlame event comes with three things, and this one is no exception:

• A welcome buddy. Someone whose job that day is you. If you're coming alone and you don't know anyone, you will not be standing by yourself.
• Friend Circle. A short structured round partway through, so the walk produces names and stories instead of six strangers looking at a view.
• A social after, and a crew chat. Dinner in Chinatown, and a group chat spun up afterward so the day doesn't evaporate on Sunday morning.

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## The honest part

About 2.2 miles with two real hill climbs, including roughly 130 steps on the Russian Hill segment. Good shoes. This is a hike, not a stroll, and the views are the reason it's worth it.
If that's not your day, the 1:15 mid-join at Huntington Park skips every stair and drops you straight into the good part. No apology needed, no explanation required — that's why the door exists.
Layers. It's warm on Polk and cold on the ridge, always.

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## Getting there

To the 11:30 staging cafe (Polk & Union): the 45 Union-Stockton runs from Caltrain up through Chinatown and along Union Street — get off at Union & Polk and you're at the door. From Civic Center BART, the 19 Polk goes straight up Polk.
To the 1:15 mid-join (Huntington Park): the 1 California bus or the California Street cable car stops at the corner.
To the 2:15 gate: five minutes' walk uphill from Powell Street BART.
Driving is a bad idea. Grant Avenue is closed between California and Broadway all day and the whole neighborhood is a parking dead zone. If you must, the Portsmouth Square Garage at 733 Kearny is the closest option.

We are growing, talk with our hosts, if you are interested in being a walk captain, or regional anchor, of our Golden Hour Sunset walks.