Xperience Days aims to provide customers with any updates relating to Xperience Days along with the latest news from the gifts and experience gifts industry. The following is an article from The Press Democrat by George Lauer.

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In the same way a striated cliff offers a glimpse of time through geological layers, Jack London Square's social and architectural layers offer a look at Oakland's past and present.

Named after the writer who also spent time in the Valley of the Moon, where a state park also bears his name, the square is full of obvious and carefully preserved references to Jack London. But there's more history there than just Jack.

The square proper is a six-plus-block-long dockside promenade called Water Street, with restaurants, shops, hotels and historic landmarks. A bronze statue of London stands in the middle of the square.

On Sundays all year long a farmers market stretches under tents along the walkway, rain or shine.

A huge new Barnes & Noble, with a de rigueur Starbucks, is a few steps from Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon, which looks pretty much the way it did when it was built in 1880.

Where rough-hewn dock workers once built sailing ships and a young Jack London dreamed of adventure, new, sleek yachts tie up next to California Canoe & Kayak's colorful personal pleasure craft.

At the north end of the promenade, the USS Potomac, President Franklin Roosevelt's ``floating White House,'' is docked below a modern, green-glassed office building rising several stories above the water.

Old mingles with new all over the neighborhood, which is larger than the square proper and bisected by busy railroad tracks. One of Amtrak's main California terminals is just north of the square and passenger trains rumble through regularly, adding an aural layer to the geology.

On the other side of the tracks, across Embarcadero West from the square, rows of 100-year-old warehouses are punctuated with Yoshi's Japanese Restaurant & World Class Jazz House, parking garages and a cross-section of retail stores and eateries ranging from chains like Bed Bath & Beyond and Cost Plus to coffeeshops and diners from the 1950s and '60s.

A few restaurants like Everett & Jones Barbecue and The Fat Lady rise to the category of destination eateries.

If you plan a trip for a specific event -- Mose Allison playing at Yoshi's, a cruise on the Potomac, a ferry ride from or to San Francisco, the farmers market -- give yourself some extra time to explore the neighborhood.

The Sunday market, billed as the East Bay's best farmers showcase, boasted a wide range of produce, baked goods, specialty food items and even live entertainment on an overcast day between January storms. In fair-weather months, craftsmen show their wares as well.

``This is actually very thin,'' said Valerie St. Louis of Berkeley. ``Usually there are a lot more vendors and the crafts people take up a whole block on that side,'' she added, waving to the south end of the promenade, which is anchored by two old buildings dwarfed by their neighbors. One is Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon and the other is half of an Alaskan cabin, where Jack London's handwriting was found on the ceiling. The cabin was dismantled 30-some years ago, half the logs went to a town in Canada and the other half came to Oakland.

Heinold's, built with wood from an old whaling ship, got its name first because it was next to the ferry crossing to Alameda, which was a dry town in the early 1900s. In later years, the name fit for all kinds of thirsty military personnel shipping out and coming home.

Heinold's was a hangout for young London, who is shown in a photo, nose buried in a book at a table in the saloon.

At the north end of the promenade sits the Potomac, a boat with several historical layers of its own. In addition to FDR, the boat's list of owners includes Elvis Presley, Danny Thomas and eventually drug smugglers who were caught on the boat in San Francisco Bay in 1980.

Some $5 million has been spent restoring the 165-foot vessel to the shape it was in when Roosevelt used it as a retreat on the Chesapeake Bay and Potomac River.

``This was sort of his floating Camp David,'' said docent Howard Murray during an hour-long tour.

Dockside tours are offered every day; spring to fall, the boat offers cruises on the bay. Education is a main objective of the Potomac Association that operates the boat; teachers are encouraged to bring classes for free field trips.

The tour is pretty much exclusively Roosevelt-related. You see the counter-balanced elevator where FDR pulled himself and his wheelchair up and down between decks; the wide, teak, stern deck furnished with wicker chairs and a bar surrounded by bullet-proof glass; the modest sleeping quarters, including a bed for FDR's dog, Fala.

If you want to know about other layers, like Elvis (he bought the boat as a fund-raiser for a hospital) or drug smugglers, you'll have to ask.