Post #590751 by congawa on Wed, May 25, 2011 2:57 PM

This is something I've been meaning to post for a while, and this Tiki vehicle thread (unless it's fully turned into a pith helmet thread) seems to be the perfect place.

This is a Kodachrome slide of me in 1964 (circa age 2) taken by my mother during a trip to San Francisco/Bay Area I only remember in small snippets (the most memorable things to me were all the neon signs of glasses containing what I thought were spoons in them that I saw out the car window from my low child's perch in the back seat, which made my parents laugh whenever I said "Hey there's the spoon in the glass again"; turns out they were, of course, neon martini glasses with an olive and toothpick--SF's neon symbol for a bar, some of which still survive. Kids say the kwayziest things).

I still have the tin cable car I'm holding in the picture (and also a smaller one, plus a wooden log truck from that trip). However, I'm not sure whether this was the San Francisco Zoo or the Oakland Zoo. I know we went to Children's Fairyland in Oakland (which I don't think this is), and one or both of the zoos, but my mother doesn't remember which this is. Maybe a NorCal TC'er will know which zoo had the elephant tiki hut trams.

Since my mother took me to a number of SoCal tiki palaces, and took a lot of pictures, I'm still working on getting her to look through her troves of photos and slides to see if there are any of polynesian restaurants (I know she took a lot of shots of the Coco Palms in Kauai when we went there in the 70's--hoping she will turn up those as well).

Caltiki Brent