As we headed into Alabama on Thursday, Meredith needed a bathroom break, so I pulled off at the first rest stop, which was also a state welcome center. It was near Huntsville, which is where they manufactured the Saturn rockets, so happily, the rest stop had a Saturn III (I think) rocket on display. Needless to say, I was happy about this rest stop.

We got to Kelly and Paul’s about 6:00. We were greeted by Kelly and Paul and the World’s Cutest Niece. It was good to get here, and the welcome was very warm, although WCN was a bit shy. We brought our stuff in while WCN watched from the safety of Mom’s arms. Mer and I then brought in our present for WCN – a fancy rocking horse that we got at the CVCA auction for WCN. She was still a little shy, but seemed to like “horsey.” She still has not ridden it, but pets it and gives it kisses. Did I mention she was the World’s Cutest Niece?

Kelly said we were going to go out for supper, and we could go for barbecue, or we could go to a local Arts Night, which happens on the first Thursday of every month. Since it only happens once a month, I jumped at the chance to go to the Arts Night to hear some music. The fact that Arts Night is put on by Mary’s Cakes, a bakery, had nothing to do with it….

The bakery is a short ride (15 minutes) from the house, and we were one of the first ones there. The weather was threatening, so it was a smaller crowd, but that was okay for us. I think it topped out at about 30 people or so, and the atmosphere was very relaxed, with people wandering around, chatting, and even dancing (mostly with the abundant numbers of toddlers).

The band had a good sound – it was blues with guitar, sax, drums, and an Englishman (the English play blues?) on keyboards. The leader, a woman, was very interactive with the crowd – chatting with us, encouraging people to dance, and even wandering into the crowd (she had a wireless electric guitar). They were fun.

Supper from the bakery was pretty much limited to sandwiches, but that was fine. The real fun was in the bakery. Mer and I got chocolate-covered brownies (very nice concept!) that had a hidden bonus of mousse inside – chocolate brownies topped with chocolate mousse covered in chocolate. Mmmmmm. As if that were not enough, one of the bakery employees had a birthday, so they gave away free cake. There were two cakes, one white and one chocolate. Each had four separate tiers, and each tier was a different flavor of filling. Cake and brownies and music and family, in a relaxed atmosphere outside. Very nice.

We took a brief wander in an antique store to look at the antique prints and maps, and then we went home. It was a nice evening. 

We are visiting my sister and her family in Alabama. It is about a 12-hour drive, and I can’t do drives that long anymore, so we decided to break the drive up. About five and a half hours into the drive is Louisville, Kentucky, and that seemed a good distance, especially if we left after I got home from work. As a great added bonus, we have a friend and former colleague who lives in Louisville, so we could stay with Beverly and visit (and save on a hotel room).

We left Ohio about 4:00, and had a nice day for driving. We stopped just south of Columbus around 6:30 to eat  at a Ruby Tuesday. We had a gift certificate, so the meal only cost $10. I had a really messy, but really good, burger, while Meredith had some Mexican egg roll things with a salad bar. It was a welcome respite from the road.

We used the last of our daylight getting through Cincinnati. I had never been through Cincinnati before, but it looks nice. It has the Ohio river, and lots of hills, and the downtown looks fairly happening (at least while going 55 mph), but is small enough to look manageable. Maybe some weekend I’ll swoop Meredith away for a two-night stay there – it looks fun.

We finally got to Beverly’s house about 11:00. Her mailing address may be Louisville, but she is a long ways from downtown – we never even saw it. She must be a good 20 miles or more from the actual city. She lives in a very nice development, and I do not often describe developments as “very nice.” The houses in the development are all brick, and while there may be similar models, the same style houses are not side by side, so it does not look like a cookie-cutter development. They also have a lot of trees there, and that helps enormously.

Beverly is a wonderful Southern lady – she is hospitable, funny, and no-nonsense, She always makes me laugh with her stories and opinions. She loves her students, but puts up with no foolishness. While at CVCA, she told a student that she had thought he was a good-looking and smart kid, but she had changed her mind – now she thought him lazy. She encouraged him to try harder, and he did. Beverly can pull off stuff like that – she is a really good teacher.

Even at that late hour, Beverly took us on a tour of her lovely house. It has a fireplace, and lots of windows, and high ceilings, and lots of open spaces. Our bedroom had a lovely bed with a huge headboard (and the bed turned out to be very comfortable!). Everywhere we went, we were followed by Beverly’s 15-year-old Persian cat, Yossarian.  Yossarian may be the most mellow cat I have ever met – he let strangers (me and Meredith) hold him, and he just purred up a storm.

After the tour of the house, we talked and laughed until 1:30 in the morning. It was good to catch up with Beverly – she is good people.

Beverly insisted on cooking us breakfast in the morning, explaining that “it’s a Southern thing.” We had Beverly wake us up about 7:30, with my goal to be on the road by 9:30 or so. Beverly got us up at 7:30, and Meredith and I both took showers, and we chatted with Beverly while she made biscuits from scratch. We ate a great breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and biscuits, and we chatted more. I took a quick look at Beverly’s computer (it had 70+ spyware programs on it), and we got on the road. At 11:00. Beverly has too many good stories to tell to get on the road at 9:30.

We stopped about 12:00 at a Dairy Queen for a pick-me-up (and to get gas). It was quite a happy cultural experience. The DQ had a smoking section, and it was twice the size of the non-smoking section. The older lady who took our order had a thick accent, and she was very nice. All the people working there had thick accents, and the people ordering from the drive-through had accents. As Meredith said, it is nice to see in this age of chains and mass-media that we still have local cultures.

Ten years! It hardly seems possible. Meredith and I have been married for TEN years! I am a very lucky man – I love my wife and she is my best friend, She makes me a better person, and we laugh together all the time. She is great.

As appropriate – this morning an alarm went off by accident at 7:00 am. I could not find it, and Meredith came over to her bag (where the alarm was) to help me. As she turned the alarm off, she said cheerily, “Happy tenth anniversary!”, to which I responded with a loving, thoughtful, “Grrrrr-uuuggggh!” as I went back to bed. My language center was not working yet. She must really love me!

We are in Alabama visiting my sister, her husband, and their daughter. We had a nice day today, including eating out twice and getting ice cream. I took a nap, and while I was asleep, Meredith left me this note on my suitcase:

“I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live
entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself
supremely blest–blest beyond what language can express; because I
am my husband’s life as fully is he is mine.”

It’s from Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. My wife is a gem!

The kitties have grown much in the last 6 weeks or so! They are still very cute. (I hope to write about the rest of the Maine vacation over the next couple of days , but it had been quite awhile since the last Quarto and Folio update.)

Candlepin bowling is always a must when we come to Maine, so Mer and I decided to do that yesterday, and then go see Wall-e, which Mer had seen but I had not. Imagine my shock and dismay to find out that the bowling alley in Augusta is closed Tuesday-Thursday during the summer! Who knew? Note to people traveling here soon (and you know who you are!) – there is unlimited bowling on Mondays and Fridays from noon-three for $8.00! Still, we did not get to bowl yesterday.

That left us in Augusta with two hours until the movie started. So, we decided to explore around. I drove us along the river to downtown Augusta, and then we were forced to turn one way or the other, so I went down toward (and across) the river. We were coming up on one of Augusta’s two rotaries (roundabouts for some of you), so on impulse I turned down a road that I had never been on. It ran right along the river’s edge, and was not looking too interesting. I was just about to turn around when I saw a small gate with the sign “Augusta Arsenal – historic landmark”, and decided to investigate.

I’m glad I did. The Arsenal is a bunch of old stone buildings in the middle of a walking park, right on the river. The buildings are sitting empty, which made me a little mad. How could cool old buildings that look right out on the river and across to the Capitol Building sit empty – and for years, from the look of things? If I had a lick of entrepreneurial spirit and any capital, I’d open a B and B or a restaurant there – what a great location!

We drove around the complex area, and a few of the buildings do seem to be used for state of Maine government stuff. One end of the Arsenal complex appears to be a hospital, with a bunch of new buildings. We left the park area near the hospital, and went our way to the shopping area where the theater is.

We were still about an hour early, but that was easily remedied – there was a Barnes and Noble next door to the theater. I got a cookie and hot chocolate, and then set off to find a biography on George Burns and Gracie Allen. It turns out that the biographies on them appear to be all out of print. That is frustrating. In my humble opinion, when a book goes out of print, the publisher should make it available for download as long as it is for personal use, but I’m clearly dreaming on that front.

We did see Wall-e, but had to sit through about 5 tedious and awful-looking movie previews. I recommend Wall-e – it is a touching movie, and clever (it is Pixar, after all). It is fascinating to see how much body language Pixar was able to give the robots, who (mostly) don’t speak. If you do see it, keep an eye out for a satellite that hits Wall-e in the face – I’m pretty sure it was Sputnik (probably a Pixar tribute).

Wall-e is a sweet movie, and got me choked up in a couple of places. Not that I can relate to a devoted, single-minded, nigh-obsessed robot or anything.

Fun facts – the full-power noise that Wall-e makes is a boot tone from an old Macintosh, and the voice of the auto pilot is not a real voice – it was Macintalk, the voice simulator that has been on Macs for a long time.

So, in the summer of endless travel, Mer and I are now kicking it in San Fran’s sister city (cosmopolitan-wise), East Livermore, Maine.

We took our normal two-day trek to get here, stopping in Albany the first night, so we had a relatively short drive of about six hours on Monday to get to Dad’s. Fun times in Albany: we stayed near the airport. I did not realize how close to the airport we were until the next morning when a plane flew right over my head as I was loading up the car. It was a real jet (not a small one), and it was probably only a few hundred feet off the ground. Nifty. We also ate at the Wolf Road Diner near the hotel, just to continue our SF diner experiences (except we got away with a bill of under $20).

I like Maine very much – it is pretty, and it is home. I also sleep like a rock here. I don’t know if it is the darkness (no city lights), the quiet, or the fresh air, but I sleep really well. I managed to get up around 9:30 this morning, and I feel much better for the rest.

What made me feel less better was my first run since getting back from the Dominican Republic (about three weeks ago). The area around Dad’s is  not very runner-friendly; your only option is to run on the road. Adding to the fun is that Maine has many hills, and the ones around Dad’s are pretty noteworthy. I ran for a total of about 24 minutes, but I had to walk some, and I did not feel all that great. Still, it is a (re)start.

When I got back from running, Dad was outside installing anti-deer whistles on his car (to try to scare deer off from the car so as to avoid collisions with large mammals). So, I started chatting with Dad while I stretched. Before too long, a neighbor pulled into the driveway, got out of his car, and started chatting.

This is one of the greatest things about Maine, and I cannot seem to get Ohio folk to process it. People drop by in Maine. You swing by; you drop in. You don’t need to “get on the calendar” or call days or weeks in advance. There is no expectation of a big meal, or a perfectly clean house (although Dad’s house is always spotless). People just want to visit. It is how things should be – good friends should be comfortable enough to swing by when they feel like it – if the person is not home or too busy, then you just keep going. It is simple. Yet, no matter how I try to explain this to my Ohio friends, I can not remember anyone in seven years ever taking me up on my open-door policy (with the notable exception of my former neighbor Sara, who understands this policy perfectly well). To me, dropping by is the ultimate expression of natural hospitality – it says that you are always welcome, and that you are important enough to stop most things to visit with you. We get way too busy in Ohio, and work and chores become more important than our relationships with our friends and neighbors. Phah, say I! Drop by my house, darn it! You are welcome.

I’ll put the soapbox away now – I have some visiting to do.

A few final thoughts on San Francisco:

We left Wednesday, and had an easy and comfortable $5.00 BART ride to the airport. The BART train from the airport had been like Chicago El trains – plastic seats and standing room; what I expected. The BART train back was like a commuter train – plush seats, lots of room – very nice! It took about 30 minutes to get from our hotel BART station to the airport. Thumbs up for BART!

San Francisco is beautiful and unique. Mer kept commenting on how she had never seen anywhere like it, and she has traveled quite a lot. The buildings (on the vast whole) are well kept and pretty, and the streets are clean (they have street cleaning three times/week in some places!). The natural beauty of the bay and the many hills make for a fantastically interesting city.

San Fran is a nice city to walk in – the city is small, and most places are within a three-mile walk. There are always quiet side streets to walk down, and the people are very friendly.

San Fran has steep hills. Lots of steep hills. I’m really not kidding! I have never seen cars parked on a 45-degree incline before. The hills really take your breath away!

San Fran is an expensive place. Eating out, even for two teetotalers, routinely ran $30 or more, and we never ate for less than $20, even at cafes and diners. Our hotel had a great location, but you pay for that.  Our hotel was listed as “inexpensive” in our tour book, but was $170/night (including tax).

While there is much to do and see in SF, I feel as if you can hit the major sights in a 7-10 day vacation. We were in SF for 3 days, and we could have seen the last three major sights (Golden Gate Park, Alcatraz, and the market) if we had been there for 3 more days. Note – Alcatraz is booked up several days in advance; if you want to tour the island, call ahead and make reservations before you go. While you can make SF a meaningful vacation for 7 days, I think you could easily do 12-14 days if you wanted to have a car for part of that time – the coastal scenery and state park system near SF are breathtaking, and wine country is close at hand as well.

San Fran is only about 750,000 people, which helps it feel manageable, but it is still a very cosmopolitan city. It has the world-famous SF Chinatown, plus a very good Little Italy, and everywhere you go you hear people speaking in foreign languages. The French and Germans seem especially fond of San Fran.

The weather is perfect for touring (my sunburn aside). With a light jacket in hand, you can walk all day and never be uncomfortable. The temperatures at night were always in the 50s, which makes for sound sleeping, and I’m not sure we hit 70 during the day. If we did, it was just into the 70s – it was perfect for wandering around (probably a bit cool for swimming in the frigid bay, but that was all right by me).

All-in-all, I give San Francisco two big thumbs up. We both had a great time, and felt as if we crammed a lot into 3 days in the city. We are even thinking of going back next summer to visit our friends and to see the things we missed. I highly recommend a trip out that way if you get a chance.

Tuesday – Day 5

Tuesday we decided to take things a little easier. We had breakfast and got going around 9:30 with the goal of walking the 3 miles to the Palace of Fine Arts, which now houses the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s excellent hands-on science museum.

We wandered a different series of streets on the way to the Palace of Fine Arts, which included a brief but worthwhile detour to check out Grace Cathedral, an Episcopalian church. It is huge, and it has copies of the brass doors of the Baptistery in Florence on the front door. Inside, the church has beautiful modern stained glass windows, and under the windows, all around the church, are murals of San Francisco’s history. They were very well done – the church was a nice mixture of traditional church architecture with modern touches.  We spent a too-brief 15 minutes looking around.

We managed to get to the Exploratorium after about an hour or so, about 30 minutes after it opened. The Palace of Fine Arts is a recreation of the original meant-to-be-temporary Colombian Exposition building that housed the, well, arts, back around 1910 or so. The rest of the Exposition was torn down, bu the people liked the Palace well enough to save it, and then to rebuild it from more sturdy material. Today, it houses a small(ish) science museum built around the idea that all of the displays should be interactive. It is quite remarkable.

The Exploratorium is small enough that you can see most (but not all) of it in one day. We had a great time mucking about with various displays. The main focus of the museum (at least right now) seems to be with the human senses, especially hearing and sight. They threw in a large section on the mind as well. These exhibits were fun in that many of them liked to mess with your senses. The mind section dealt with superstitions and learned behaviors (like why should it be gross to drink from a toilet-shaped drinking fountain?).  It linked closely to the light and sight section where the displays kept throwing you curves in perspective. There was a room that had strange proportions, but looked to be symmetrical because the mind wants to see it that way. There were displays on how the mind fixes on general things – there was a huge picture where something in the picture changed every 3 seconds or so, but I rarely saw what it was. This included the replacing of an entire tree with another tree, right in front of me, but I did not notice it. Very effective, and very strange. There were lights you could shine into your eyes to let you see the blood vessels in the back of the eye (that your brain usually ignores) and one that lets you see the blood cells whizzing about in your eye (something else your brain ignores). There were exhibits on the eyes’ blind spots (you cannot see where the optic nerve leaves the eye, but normally the brain fills this section in for you), there were displays dealing with optical illusions and others dealing with how we see color. The sight section was where we spent most of our time.

We spent most of our last hour in the hearing section of the museum. In this area, you got to mess with different musical instruments, try to guess environments just based on sound, try to determine where sounds were coming from, hear how different object resonate at different frequencies, play name-that-tune when the tune was being played several octaves apart (harder than you might think), and so on.

When we entered the museum, one of the first displays I saw was a cloud chamber. Cloud chambers were used in early particle physics to show paths of small particles, like electrons. When a cosmic ray hits an atom, it scatters particles around. The particles can cause a gas (like gaseous alcohol) to condense around the particles. These trails are small, but still big enough to be seen with the naked eye. It was really really cool! There were a TON of cosmic rays in this two-foot-by-three-foot cloud chamber. Neat-o.

The only downside to the museum (no surprise here) was that the food was expensive. We split a small pizza, and it still cost $7. It went to an excellent museum, though, so no hard feelings. I really liked the Exploratorium – highly recommended.

We left the Palace of Fine Arts around closing time (5:00), and headed off in search of a (steady, now!) bus so that we would not have to walk the several miles to the Golden Gate Park, which we wanted to visit, even if only briefly. We did manage to find the correct bus, so after $3 and 30 minutes, we got off at the edge of the park.

It turns out that Golden Gate Park is huge. Really huge. We walked around in it for a little over an hour (so about 3 – 3.5 miles), and we just managed one little corner in the northeast section of the park. I even had to pass up going up a large hill in the middle of a small lake because of time concerns, and we still only saw a little of the park! We got there too late to see any of the attractions (the art museum, the tea garden), but the park is still very pretty. And did I mention large?

Once we wandered out of the park discouragingly close to where we had entered, we decided to take a bus back to our hotel, and go on from there to supper (it being almost 7:00). The bus route we were near was not the one Mer had originally wanted to take, but I did not want to walk another mile to get the “right” bus, so we took this one (a Number 5). This bus was going close to an area our tour book had mentioned as sketchy, but it was still daylight, and so we decided to try it.

The bus ride was fine. We even made it just within the 90-minute “transfer” time from our first bus trip and so did not have to pay for another fare. The people on the bus were very respectable looking, and the areas we were driving though felt safe enough. I did notice more iron bars on the windows, there was some street trash around, and some of the buildings needed some paint – that was the extent of the “bad” that I saw via the bus.

The bus let us out a few blocks from the cable car terminus, which was five blocks from our hotel. Cities are strange things. We were let out on Market Street. It should be a beautiful street – it is wide, with wide (ten+-foot) sidewalks of brick, with lots of trees. For four blocks or so on Market, there were closed businesses, businesses with lots of bars over the windows, and a few strip clubs. Then, we crossed one street, and we were in shopping central, one block from the cable car terminus and three blocks from Union Square. It has always amazed me how quickly neighborhoods can change – very often in just one block. Weird.

After a short regrouping (map checking) at the hotel, we struck off through Chinatown to head to North Beach (Little Italy). We wanted to check out a restaurant our book recommended. It was a bit of a walk away (about 30-40 minutes), but it was a nice evening. We found the restaurant without too much trouble. But we found it closed and locked up. We had left the tour book at the hotel, so we swung into a nearby store (a liquor store) to ask directions to our backup restaurant. The men in the store were helpful and steered us to the restaurant, a few blocks away.

It was a small, family-run place. Even at 8:00 on a Tuesday, there was a 30-minute wait. So, we waited at the bar and enjoyed the female bartender bantering with a couple of her customers. When we did get our table, it was happily right in the window where we could watch the street. We were pretty beat at this point, so our dinner (mine was good, Mer’s was excellent) was largely quiet.

Meredith had a baked-goods craving (that I was happy to share), so after dinner, we struck off on the 25-minute walk to Union Square to go to the Cheesecake Factory that we had seen signs for. We got a little turned around, but found our way without any detours. We were looking forward to dessert, only to be confronted with closed doors. It turns out that the Cheesecake Factory is inside the Macy’s store, which was closed. Morale was low. We checked out a Border’s cafe, but that did not seem too exciting; however, spirits rallied when we found an open Walgreen’s that had Ghirardelli’s chocolate on sale. We snatched up three bars and went back to the hotel, where we munched on two and saved the other for the airport on Wednesday.

All in all, another fantastic day in SF. I think we managed about another 7 miles on our “easy” day. 🙂

Day
4 Monday

My
brother Shannon would be proud of us. Shannon is known for being a fan of
walking. And walking. And walking. Meredith decided today that we should go see
the Golden Gate Bridge and walk out on it. There are bus lines that run out to
the bridge, but then you have to figure out the transit system (one bus to the
bridge, $1.50 each way – too complicated!). So, with Meredith’s good humor, I
decided we should walk out to the bridge. And back. All in all, by estimating
based on time, maps, and a little mapmyrun.com, it looks as if we marched
around SF to the tune of 13-15 miles in one day. Boy, did we see a lot of SF!

We
got going on our constitutional by leaving the hotel around 10:30. Mer wanted
to go up in Coit Tower, which was okay by me, so we struck out in that
direction. To make things more interesting, Mer wanted to go back through a
different part of Chinatown during the day. We went through one of the main
decorative arches, and so we were in tourist-land for a few blocks before we
detoured over into smaller streets, which included a stop in a very cool kite
store (and I imagine that windy SF is a great kite city!). We then went over to
the main shopping street, where the local Chinese do their shopping. It was
wild! It was really crowded, and there were wares for sale everywhere, even
spilling out onto the sidewalk. Mer spent a year in Hong Kong when she was 8,
and the smells kept bringing her back to there. It was very authentic! There
were whole cooked chickens and ducks for sale (heads, necks, and legs
included), there were fruits everywhere, and 
there were many foods that I could not even identify. And people. Lots
and lots and lots of people speaking in Chinese. How cool.

One
of the reasons I love travel is that you almost always run into something
wacky. My wacky Chinatown moment is this: there was a tank truck pulled up next
to the sidewalk. A man was on top with a net on a pole, and he was dipping the
net into the tank on the truck. He would then scoop out a bunch of very alive
fish and dump them into a 50-gallon trash barrel that was on wheels. We passed
by, but then were overtaken by the man with the trash can full of fish. As he passed
by, a fish jumped out of the barrel and onto the sidewalk. The man stopped and
scooped it back into the barrel. And all the while, this Chinese fisherman was
whistling “Dust in the Wind.” What a strange and fantastic moment.

I
eventually asked to get off the crowded main street, so we turned off to a side
street. As we were leaving Chinatown (and entering Little Italy), there was an
espresso shop with gelato (Italian ice cream) for sale in the window. The
flavors of the Italian ice cream in the Italian cafe were listed in Chinese and
English. I really do love travel.

We
climbed up Telegraph Hill a different (and perhaps an even steeper) way, and it
was a tremendous view again. We went into the tower store to get our tickets to
go to the top, and did not realize the entrance to the elevator was through the
store (sadly, the stairs were closed). Our confusion about the elevator turned
out to be a good thing, because it caused us to wander around inside the base
of the tower, which is decorated by WPA-funded murals (from the 30s). They were
all scenes of people, mostly workers and mostly in SF. Some unusual ones: a car
accident with police on the scene and two hurt/dead people (in the 30s!), a man
blow-torching the outside of a dead pig (presumably to get the hair off?), stock
workers at the Chicago Board of Trade with all the graphs of stocks plummeting
down, and my favorite – a library where a man was pulling down a copy of Marx’s
Das
Capital (sic). I bet the WPA
loved that!

Once
we went around the circumference of the base of the tower, we figured out that
we had missed the elevator, and corrected our mistake. Even the elevator ride
was great – it had two floors, top and bottom – and it was still operated by an
attendant who ran the elevator manually (including the scissor-cage doors).
Because you could see through the doors, you could see the wall of the tower
going by as you went up. Neat.

Not
surprisingly, the views from the top of the tower were wonderful. The tower is
easily above the treeline of the hill, and so you have unobstructed views of
the bay and the city. We could make out all the major landmarks. And, I was
happy because the windows were plexi-glassed in, so I felt safe (I have a
well-developed fear of heights that defies all rational thought, on the rare
occasions I have rational thoughts). My fear of heights was just getting warmed
up, but I get ahead of myself.

Meredith
wanted to see Lombard Street, which is famous for having a ton of switchbacks
(happily decorated with flowers), so we struck off in that direction. We found
the street without too much trouble, and before heading up (there are a lot of
“ups” in SF), we stopped at a nice cafe for lunch. In retrospect,
this was a fantastic idea, since it would be about 8 hours and 10 miles before
we ate again.

Newly
fortified, we went up the stairs (SF has a lot of stairs) that pass as the
sidewalk on Lombard Street. The stairs border the actual winding part of the
street, which is off-limits to pedestrians, since there is very little room for
the cars to make it through. The houses here were beautiful, especially the
ones facing the bay, and I suspect they all go for millions of dollars.

The
buildings in SF are almost all beautiful. Each building has its own look – no
housing development stamps are allowed here. All of the buildings I have seen
are well kept, and in the course of walking 15 miles, we saw many many
buildings. They tend to be colorful, and most are 3-4 stories, which is
pleasing to the eye (not too tall). The owners do wonderful things with what
little land they have – most buildings have trees, flowers, and/or well-kept
shrubbery. I have rarely seen trash anywhere in the city – the one time I
remember seeing it, I noticed it because a woman was  in the street picking it up to throw it away.
It looks as if the people of SF take great pride in their city, and they should
– it is just a fantastic place.

In
addition to getting to see many neighborhoods, one great advantage to taking
your time and walking is that you can explore. Near the top of one of the hills
near Hyde Pier I saw some steps. Steps! Going up! So, we had to take them. They
led to a small and quiet park, where the benches had direct views of the bay
and the Golden Gate Bridge. Not too shabby! We rested here for several minutes.

We
continued to walk through nice neighborhoods, managing to avoid the few major
roads that SF has. The nice thing about walking is that you can always walk up to
the next block to avoid traffic and get a quieter street. Along the way I took
many photos of homes and the flowers around them (digital cameras are nice!).
We eventually got to the old military outpost called the Presidio.

We
had heard about the Presidio on our boat tour on Sunday. It was founded in 1776
by the Spanish (which does not prevent the gate from having a “1776”
emblem emblazoned in red, white, and blue across the entrance), and then was
captured by Mexico, and then we got it. Sometime recently (2002? 1994?) the
government gave it to the park services, and they have been turning it into
housing using the existing buildings. I had figured it would be efficient – not
bleak, but not pretty. It turns out that if I were to live in SF, I would live
in the Presidio (if I could afford it). It looks and feels like a college
campus, and it is huge. There are enormous green spaces everywhere, and the buildings are attractive – brick or wooden siding, and spaced out well. There
are lots of places to park (if you were to have a car), and almost everywhere
has a view of something (SF, the bridge, the bay). All of this just a few miles
from downtown SF! Why anyone would live anywhere else is beyond me.

So,
we had an enjoyable (if not brief) walk through one part of the Presidio. We
waked under one of the approach bridges for the GG Bridge, and found ourselves
in a wide space that ended in a beach and a few park buildings. We decided to
check them out (partly driven on by the promise of a bathroom). The beach
itself is fairly narrow, but the green space around the area was very large.
The buildings hosted some small maritime museum, but it was closed, so we
wandered to a nearby pier that had an up-close view of the underside of the
bridge, as well as a “warming hut” that had a small cafe with
adjoining bathrooms.

We
wandered out on the pier for some nice views of the city as well as the bridge.
The wind was whipping pretty well here – it had been picking up as the day got
later and as we got close to the mouth of the bay. The bay is considered one of
the great places to windsurf and to kite-surf, and it is not hard to see why –
you can count on there being plenty of wind. The major drawback is the water temperature.
As I found out for my mandatory look-ma-I-have-my-feet-in-the-water picture,
the bay is cold. According to our boat tour, the bay tends to be in the 50s.
After the slight detour of the pier, we decided it was time to head up a path
and tackle the bridge itself.

Let’s
face facts:  the bridge is tall. Really
tall. Really really scare-the-pants-off-Matt tall. Maybe one of my subconscious
reasons for walking the 5 miles to the bridge was to put off having to go on
it. Mer really wanted to go out on the bridge, so I wanted to support her, so I
tried going out on the bridge. There was a standard guardrail, about chest
high. This made me nervous. Then, happily, the guardrail went over our heads.
That made me feel better and I began to think I could go out on the bridge.
Then the extra fencing stopped – it was there only to protect the old fort
under the bridge. It was back to the not-high-enough standard rail. I kept my
eyes down on the sidewalk and walked on, near the left side of the sidewalk. I
was promptly yelled at by a cyclist (who called me “dumb ass”)
because I was on his side. I did deserve it in that I was on his side of the
sidewalk, but I could not get closer to that drop. The bridge climbs to a
height of almost 800 feet above the bay. I made it as far as the first pylon.
Mer told me to look up at it and she went around to the other side of the
pylon. I later found out that she commented to me something to the effect of,
“See? Isn’t this cool?” except I was already on my way back to the
shore. On the way back, the wind was whipping, and I could not help but see
that the sidewalk had small drain holes in it that revealed that the sidewalk
was only 2 inches thick. Mentally I know that is enough. Emotionally, I was a
wreck. Mer figured out that I was gone, and came and joined me on the shore
after a few minutes.

After
I calmed down, we went back down the walking trail to check out Fort Point, an
old army fort that the bridge was built over. It is about four stories tall,
and it was fun to walk about on the inside. We just missed the film showing the
construction of the bridge, which was too bad, but we got there just 30 minutes
before they closed, so we were still able to climb to the top. It was strange
up there – on the land side of the fort the wind was blowing pretty well. Then
we wandered over to the bay side. I have never been in wind like that. It was
just amazing. My guess is the arch and supports of the bridge act like a wind
tunnel, but regardless, that was the strongest wind I have ever been in.

We
decided to go a different route on the way back. There appeared to be a wide
walking/jogging path that followed the bay, so we took that. It turns out that
the path runs back into the edge of the city proper, but not so far as the
piers. That was okay – we took it easy on the path and watched a few
windsurfers and a few kite-surfers. We even stopped to talk to a man who had
just finished kite-surfing, but, while polite, he was busy trying to pack his
gear up, so we did not bother him for too long. Once the walking path ended, we
trekked along a city street, looking at more impressive houses along the way.

We
found our way to a hamburger joint near Telegraph Hill where we had excellent
BBQ burgers and a huge mound of chili cheese fries (the chili was a little
bitter, but good).

We
got back to the hotel, where I had to stay close to a bathroom as the result of
dehydration. It took about an hour for me to feel better, but we were able to
go to the diner again for dessert, which was okay.

It
was a very very busy day! We also managed to prove that you can get sunburned
on a cloudy day if you are outside for 10 hours.

I’ll leave you with a picture of our first SF kitty, and two church signs that caught my attention.

Day 3 Sunday

San Francisco continues to impress. What a great city! It is very nice to walk around (and we walked a LOT of it today), and the people are super-freindly. We were looking at our guidebook or map on two different occasions today and random people stopped to ask if we needed help – nice going, SF!

Meredith was in charge of the day, and wanted to surprise me, so I had no idea of what we were going to do. We ate a nice breakfast (French toast) at our hotel, and headed out around 10:00. We started by going to church (it was Sunday, after all). Meredith took me the several-block walk to Glide Church, which is well known as an activist church concerned with social justice and the poor.

Glide was a thought-provoking, interesting, and complex experience for me. The church is way out there in helping and loving people – a homeless man told us they had 65 programs in SF, including owning two large buildings for low-income housing. The church was open and friendly and had created a wonderful community where people were accepted and loved. The music kicked butt with a great choir and band.  The service was called a celebration service, and it was a celebration. The hard part for me was the theology, or almost total lack of it. God was rarely mentioned, and when he was, it was in a very general sense. The service opened with the proclamation that “God is here! The Lord is here! Allah is here! Krishna is here!” There were times where a leader said, “God be praised! Goddess be praised!”  A man who is going through tough times with his relationship, his health, his home, and his job got up to give a testimony where the only mention of God was to thank God for Glide Church – he spent most of his time giving praise to Glide Church and his therapist rather than to God. I am NOT mocking the man’s pain at all – there was just little evidence of relying on God in his troubles. The sermon had three parts, which did not seem too related, did not mention God, and only mentioned Jesus once to say that Jesus never rejected anyone (which is not true – Jesus at least rejected some of the religious leaders of his day). The minister even went so far as to say that he did not know if God heard prayers or not, but that he was going to continue on.

So, here is a church that is doing the real work of the church, but seems to have little idea of who they are doing it for. They are putting many or most evangelical churches to shame in their ministries. It should be a wake-up call to more conservative Christians elsewhere – we need to be doing more for social justice. It seems to me that Glide shows love without much truth of the Gospel, but that most conservative churches show the truth with few practical displays of love. We need to work on that. James points out that works without faith are pointless, but also warned that faith without works is dead. Meredith pointed it out well with the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. Jesus told her, “I do not condemn you. Now go, and sin no more.” Glide is great at the not condemning, but misses the sin-no-more part. Many evangelical churches are great at the sin no-more-part, but miss the not-condemning part. It needs to be both: works and faith. I want a church with conservative theology and liberal social outreach. Going to Glide was very much a worthwhile experience. (As an aside, we were there for the 102nd birthday of Mother Ruth Jones, an activist who was active in the Black Panthers and other social justice causes).

After church, Mer and I walked down to the terminus of the cable car line. As efficient public transportation, cable cars are lousy. As fun things to do, they are great! A one-way ticket costs $5.00, and we waited in line for about 20 minutes (on busy days it can reach 2 hours). We made sure we got on the “pretty” line instead of the faster, more direct line. Mer wanted to stand on a sideboard, so we did that. That is a bit of an adventure. We were on the right side, which passes very close to parked cars or moving cars passing the cable car. You are warned from time to time to watch for mirrors. The people on the left side of the car had to watch it when they passes very close to cable cars coming the other way. People can use the cable cars for transportation, but our car was very full, and we bypassed several stops that had waiting passengers because we had no room. The views from the cable car ranged from interesting to breath taking. It was also much fun to watch the operator run the car. Cable cars work by grabbing a cable under the car (and pavement). The cable is always moving, and provides the locomotion for the car. The cable car has no motor of any kind. This means the operator really needs to put his back into pulling the lever that grabs the cable, especially when you start from a stop going up hill. The cable car ride was about 20 minutes, and it was a great time – highly recommended.

We got off the cable car at the end of the line, which is the piers on the bay (the far northeastern side of the city). We wandered down Hyde Street Pier, where we had a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge, and ran into two of Julie’s friends, Kerry and Chris. They had swung into SF just so Chris could see the city for the first time, and had stopped at the pier to get a few pictures. They were on the pier for about 15 minutes total, and that was when we showed up. I love things like that!

Meredith wanted to see if we could get a tour of Alcatraz, so we walked a fair ways to Pier 33 (after fortifying ourselves with a Ben and Jerry’s stop), where the tours leave from. The next available tour was for Friday, so we got tickets for the 5:30 bay cruse that would take us around the bay, including by the island. We had two hours until we had to be back, so we wandered the neighborhood streets to downtown to the Transamerican Building (the famous pyramid one). It took about 30 minutes to get there. We then wandered back up through North Beach (SF’s Little Italy, which is right next to Chinatown), where Mer pointed out interesting houses and places: a few buildings that survived the 1906 earthquake, a few houses or offices where famous authors lived or wrote, a few bars or clubs where bands or comedians got their start. That was interesting, but mostly I enjoyed wandering the pretty neighborhoods of the city. After the walking tour, we still had about an hour to get back to the pier, so I was able to indulge my curiosity. I saw a sign for Coit Tower, which turns out to be on Telegraph Hill, one of the taller hills in SF. A tower! Up a hill! Up a steep hill! Of course we had to go!

That was a pretty climb up to the tower, If you ever come to SF, it is worth going to, but walk – do not drive. Parking is very limited, and there was a line of cars waiting for spaces. Besides, the walking route is more direct and pretty. We did not go up the tower – there was a line, and we were on a schedule, so we decided we should go back on Monday to go up the tower itself. Our map showed a road going away from the tower, so we went looking for it. It turned out to be stairs instead of a road – almost 400 stairs that wound down the hill through gardens and really cool houses. What a great walk! It came out about three blocks from Pier 33, so we were back in plenty of time for the bay cruise.

The cruise was great – we had a sunny and fairly clear day, so we could see across the entire bay. The ship was fairly full, but we got standing room next to the upper-deck railing, so we could see well and take some good photos of the city and the Golden Gate Bridge. Word of warning – always bring a jacket where ever you go in SF – even on a sunny day, the bay was really windy and cool – I had a jacket and was still shivering toward the end of the 90-minute tour.

The highlight of the cruise for me was the bridge, We went all the way out to it, and went under it. It is just immense. What a fantastic structure! It was really cool to get to see it from underneath. Nifty.

The cruise did circle Alcatraz three times while telling the history of the fort and prison. It was interesting and I enjoyed it. It was mostly viewable from the other side of the ship, and I did not want to wrangle to get a better view, so I contented myself with limited views of the island, but with great views of San Francisco.

After we got back to the pier, it was about 7:30, so we decided to walk to Chinatown (about 25 minutes) for supper. There was about a 30-minute wait at the restaurant we chose, but that was okay. We had a good rest in chairs while waiting for a table, and we could see the place was a good mixture of tourists and locals. We finally got to our table, and we both ordered a house specialty – beef in a special sauce. It was good – not blow-me-away, but very nice throughout. We did decide to get dessert elsewhere (we are not overly fond of Chinese desserts). We ended up walking back to Nob Hill to our hotel, and went to a diner our tour book recommended (Sears Diner). It may have been a diner once, but it was pretty swanky now. We got a seat right next to a big bay window where we could see cable cars and we could people-watch. We got mousse cakes and I got a (very average) hot chocolate, and we enjoyed watching SF go by outside the window.

We got back to the hotel about 10:00, where I promptly fell asleep in my clothes with my glasses still on. It had been a full day!