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So, over two weeks ago (March 11-14, 2005), Jorn and I went on an absolutely fabulous trip to San Francisco, which neither of us has had time to write about yet. Considering that Jorn's feeling a little down lately, maybe reading about and remembering our awesome trip will perk him up. *kiss*
Friday morning, we got up around 4:30am. I had showered the night before, but Jorn needed to shower, and then we grabbed our already-packed bags and headed for the airport. I think we got there around 6am, and our flight was leaving at 8:10 (I'll have to go back and check my ticket stub for sure, but that's what I remember). We vegged out at the airport and read our books till boarding time, and I think I read all the way through the flight as well (I was reading Ringworld and it was awesome!). We were supposed to land in Oakland at noon PST, but we actually landed about half an hour early. (I highly recommend traveling on JetBlue, BTW.) Oh, and it had been about to snow in Boston when we left, so when we landed in California we kept peeling off the layers we had worn to the airport. By the time we were waiting for the airport shuttle, I was wearing just a t-shirt and had stuffed I think two other shirts into my bag and was carrying my coat, and man was I happy about it. So the shuttle from Oakland airport to the train station cost $2 each--no problem--and then the train from the airport station to downtown SF cost $3.15. It ended up being totally easy to do, really fast, and hella cheaper than getting a taxi.
Our hotel turned out to be mere steps away from the train station on Market Street as well as mere steps from the cable car turnaround, so it was ideally located. The guy at the front desk let us check in way early, which was awesome. We took our stuff up to our room and I think I took a shower because I was feeling icky from the plane. When I got dressed I put on sandals! And a skirt with no tights! And a short-sleeved shirt! And it was awesome. We figured that we'd probably get tired early, since we'd been up since 4am Boston time, but we thought we'd take a walk around, see what was in the area around our hotel, do some sight seeing, and then just head back when we felt like it. The weather was beautiful, perfect for walking around. As we walked up through Union Square my cell phone rang--it was Lauren! And she had no idea we were going to SF, so she was all shocked and jealous when I told her.
We kept walking up and found the gate into Chinatown, which was really cool. Chinatown is huge in SF. By this time it was almost 3pm and we were getting hungry, so we found a Chinese place (of course) for lunch. The place we picked was really nice and claimed to have been there since the 1920s; the food was pretty excellent, and Jorn used his chopsticks to eat his entire meal, so I was very proud. After lunch we kept walking up and got to North Beach (which, if you don't know, isn't actually a beach but is more of a Little Italy) and eventually got to Washington Square. (Oh, and when something is a "Square" in SF, they don't just mean an intersection, they mean a nice little park!) My pictures from Washington Square show Jorn with a pouty face, which I think was because of the many dogs enjoying the park that afternoon. We realized we were pretty close to the Crookedest Street so we thought we'd go walk over there and check it out. At this point we really began to understand why people say SF is full of hills. We hauled our wussy New Englander asses up and down so many hills while we were there, and the first really big one was the one up to the Crookedest Street. It certainly is very crooked. While we walked up the footpath next to the street, I saw speeding down the hill a minivan full of children laughing and shrieking, "Go faster, Daddy, go faster!" That was pretty cute. When we got to the top I ran the last little bit in order to get a picture of Jorn hauling himself up those last few steps. We took some pictures down the hill, but because the sun was behind us, they didn't turn out as well as I'd thought they would. Oh well. From the top of that hill we could see out into the ocean (or is it a bay?) and we could see Alcatraz from there, which was pretty neat. More pictures ensued.
At this point we realized we were practically right at Ghiradelli Square! So of course that was our next stop. At the Ghiradelli factory store I bought a horrendously overpriced chocolate covered strawberry that was really, really good. Then we broke down and had the obligatory hot fudge sundaes in their ice cream shop. Superyum. They had on display a bunch of old chocolate-making equipment, which was neat to see. Then we did some shopping in the cute little shops around the Square before (right around sunset, so maybe it was 6pm?) taking a little walk near the beach. (Have you noticed that the Word Of The Day is "walk"?)
Then we walked (there it is again!) up towards Fisherman's Wharf just to see what was up that way, and what did we find but the Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Museum!! And guess who had packed her $2 off coupon!! (That would be me.) So we went through the Ripley's Museum, which was a heck of a lot of fun. I haven't done one of those in a long time, and Jorn hadn't in even longer, so it was great. But by the time we were done there, we were really wiped out. We hit a gift shop on the way back and then walked back up almost to Ghiradelli Square, to the cable car turnaround there, and caught a cable car back down to where our hotel was. By then it was dark out and kind of chilly. By the time we got to bed it was maybe 10pm, which was 1am Boston time, so we'd really had a full day.
We tried to sleep in on Saturday morning, but no luck: both of us were awake at around 7:30am. The coffee shop downstairs in the hotel lobby wasn't even open yet. I clicked on the TV and started watching 50 First Dates, which, I was totally shocked to discover, was a really cute movie. Jorn and I both liked it a lot. All the slapstick punching stuff they show in the preview is *all* of that sort of thing that there is in the movie, and there's a lot of really heartfelt sweet stuff that they don't show in the preview. I liked the movie a lot. Around 10 we went up the street to Lori's Diner, whose slogan should have been "All that great 1950s atmosphere and none of the great 1950s food!" Way overpriced, and my waffle was exactly like the waffles I used to make myself in the SU caf. Not bad, but not worth $8. Jorn had better luck with his breakfast, but the whole experience made me grumpy. Also, the weather was incredibly overcast and chilly (well, for San Francisco), and we weren't sure what to do--the weather reports had predicted nice weather on Saturday and overcast chilly weather for Sunday and Monday, so we had tentatively planned to do the beach on Saturday. It was definitely not beachy weather.
We decided to head for the beach anyway, since we didn't know what Sunday and Monday would be like, so we hopped on a bus to head for Baker Beach, Jantine's favorite beach. As we went, the weather continued to not get nicer, and Baker Beach continued to not be close to anything else we wanted to do, so we changed course midway through the ride and decided to head for Golden Gate Park instead, so we could walk around the park, stop at Ocean Beach on the other side of the park, and basically do more stuff. There was a more direct way to Golden Gate Park from our hotel than the way we took, but it turned out fine and we didn't lose too much time.
It turns out that Golden Gate Park is a whole lot bigger than it looks on the map!! It's maybe four or five miles wide and a mile long. We weren't aware of this when we got off the bus around 19th Street. We walked all the way through the park, keeping toward the southern edge of it, and found that one of the last streets before you hit the water is, like, 48th. It's one long park. A very pretty park, but still. After emerging from the park we both had to use a bathroom like whoa, and there were no fast food places around at all. Even the one gas station's bathrooms were out of order. It was like a wasteland. The only place was this Thai cafe in a rundown hotel, and their sign said you had to order food if you wanted to use the bathroom. We split fries and a coke, and it turned out to be an okay little place (that reminded me of my Gammy's living room, in spite of the Thai decor). It was actually good to sit down for a few minutes after the big walk we'd just had.
After the fries, we headed for the beach! It was too cold to shed any actual clothing, so we just took off our shoes and socks to dip our toes in the water. This was the first time either of us had touched the Pacific, so we took a bunch of pictures. (We also called Dylan to get him to look something up on IMDB for us that we kept arguing about--turns out Don Rickles and Don Cheadle are totally different people.) We walked all the way up Ocean Beach along the western border of the park, maybe a mile. After we dried off our feet (with a towel I'd smuggled out of the hotel) we saw Cliff House up on the hill and thought we'd walk up there (and, of course, use their bathroom). Cliff House was pretty cool--apparently there's been a house there for around 150 years, as a place for travelers to stop as they went up the coast. There's a nice view there of Seal Rock.
After Cliff House, we decided to walk back down and into the other side of the park to try to find the bison pen. Yes, the bison pen. They keep bison right there in the park! So we headed back down into the park, walked around a really pretty lake, and finally saw the bison, just as it was starting to rain a bit. The bison were awesome, even if they were too far away from the fence for me to get really good pictures. Then we walked back up out of the park to its northern edge (all the directions I'm using, by the way, refer to the way the city looked on the map, and not necessarily to its actual orientation--wish I had the map with me, maybe it would say) and got on another bus. We were pretty hungry and thought we'd try a restaurant Jantine had recommended for dinner, Papalote, down on Valencia. We walked about eight blocks from where the bus dropped us off down Valencia, and by happy coincidence found several excellent bookstores! My favorite was the one that carried only fantasy and sci fi books, had a good used section in the back, and featured a hairless cat as one of its residents. I bought several books there.
Finally Jorn managed to drag me out of the bookstores and to the restaurant. We ate some fucking delicious Mexican food, let me tell you. We both got chicken quesadillas, with our traditional fixin's: sour cream for Jorn, and guacamole for me. Their salsa was also very good. Their soda case had some really interesting and different kinds of soda, including Leninade, which Jorn had to try (he said it was good and brought home a bottle for his friend Dan). Then I figured out that there was a bus that would take us right back to the train station on Market near our hotel, and we had to wait a while but the bus arrived and it took us right where it was supposed to. I think we fell asleep around 9:30pm. We walked a heck of a lot on Saturday.
Wow, it took me a while to type all of this out. I'll do the rest tomorrow, hopefully.
Friday morning, we got up around 4:30am. I had showered the night before, but Jorn needed to shower, and then we grabbed our already-packed bags and headed for the airport. I think we got there around 6am, and our flight was leaving at 8:10 (I'll have to go back and check my ticket stub for sure, but that's what I remember). We vegged out at the airport and read our books till boarding time, and I think I read all the way through the flight as well (I was reading Ringworld and it was awesome!). We were supposed to land in Oakland at noon PST, but we actually landed about half an hour early. (I highly recommend traveling on JetBlue, BTW.) Oh, and it had been about to snow in Boston when we left, so when we landed in California we kept peeling off the layers we had worn to the airport. By the time we were waiting for the airport shuttle, I was wearing just a t-shirt and had stuffed I think two other shirts into my bag and was carrying my coat, and man was I happy about it. So the shuttle from Oakland airport to the train station cost $2 each--no problem--and then the train from the airport station to downtown SF cost $3.15. It ended up being totally easy to do, really fast, and hella cheaper than getting a taxi.
Our hotel turned out to be mere steps away from the train station on Market Street as well as mere steps from the cable car turnaround, so it was ideally located. The guy at the front desk let us check in way early, which was awesome. We took our stuff up to our room and I think I took a shower because I was feeling icky from the plane. When I got dressed I put on sandals! And a skirt with no tights! And a short-sleeved shirt! And it was awesome. We figured that we'd probably get tired early, since we'd been up since 4am Boston time, but we thought we'd take a walk around, see what was in the area around our hotel, do some sight seeing, and then just head back when we felt like it. The weather was beautiful, perfect for walking around. As we walked up through Union Square my cell phone rang--it was Lauren! And she had no idea we were going to SF, so she was all shocked and jealous when I told her.
We kept walking up and found the gate into Chinatown, which was really cool. Chinatown is huge in SF. By this time it was almost 3pm and we were getting hungry, so we found a Chinese place (of course) for lunch. The place we picked was really nice and claimed to have been there since the 1920s; the food was pretty excellent, and Jorn used his chopsticks to eat his entire meal, so I was very proud. After lunch we kept walking up and got to North Beach (which, if you don't know, isn't actually a beach but is more of a Little Italy) and eventually got to Washington Square. (Oh, and when something is a "Square" in SF, they don't just mean an intersection, they mean a nice little park!) My pictures from Washington Square show Jorn with a pouty face, which I think was because of the many dogs enjoying the park that afternoon. We realized we were pretty close to the Crookedest Street so we thought we'd go walk over there and check it out. At this point we really began to understand why people say SF is full of hills. We hauled our wussy New Englander asses up and down so many hills while we were there, and the first really big one was the one up to the Crookedest Street. It certainly is very crooked. While we walked up the footpath next to the street, I saw speeding down the hill a minivan full of children laughing and shrieking, "Go faster, Daddy, go faster!" That was pretty cute. When we got to the top I ran the last little bit in order to get a picture of Jorn hauling himself up those last few steps. We took some pictures down the hill, but because the sun was behind us, they didn't turn out as well as I'd thought they would. Oh well. From the top of that hill we could see out into the ocean (or is it a bay?) and we could see Alcatraz from there, which was pretty neat. More pictures ensued.
At this point we realized we were practically right at Ghiradelli Square! So of course that was our next stop. At the Ghiradelli factory store I bought a horrendously overpriced chocolate covered strawberry that was really, really good. Then we broke down and had the obligatory hot fudge sundaes in their ice cream shop. Superyum. They had on display a bunch of old chocolate-making equipment, which was neat to see. Then we did some shopping in the cute little shops around the Square before (right around sunset, so maybe it was 6pm?) taking a little walk near the beach. (Have you noticed that the Word Of The Day is "walk"?)
Then we walked (there it is again!) up towards Fisherman's Wharf just to see what was up that way, and what did we find but the Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Museum!! And guess who had packed her $2 off coupon!! (That would be me.) So we went through the Ripley's Museum, which was a heck of a lot of fun. I haven't done one of those in a long time, and Jorn hadn't in even longer, so it was great. But by the time we were done there, we were really wiped out. We hit a gift shop on the way back and then walked back up almost to Ghiradelli Square, to the cable car turnaround there, and caught a cable car back down to where our hotel was. By then it was dark out and kind of chilly. By the time we got to bed it was maybe 10pm, which was 1am Boston time, so we'd really had a full day.
We tried to sleep in on Saturday morning, but no luck: both of us were awake at around 7:30am. The coffee shop downstairs in the hotel lobby wasn't even open yet. I clicked on the TV and started watching 50 First Dates, which, I was totally shocked to discover, was a really cute movie. Jorn and I both liked it a lot. All the slapstick punching stuff they show in the preview is *all* of that sort of thing that there is in the movie, and there's a lot of really heartfelt sweet stuff that they don't show in the preview. I liked the movie a lot. Around 10 we went up the street to Lori's Diner, whose slogan should have been "All that great 1950s atmosphere and none of the great 1950s food!" Way overpriced, and my waffle was exactly like the waffles I used to make myself in the SU caf. Not bad, but not worth $8. Jorn had better luck with his breakfast, but the whole experience made me grumpy. Also, the weather was incredibly overcast and chilly (well, for San Francisco), and we weren't sure what to do--the weather reports had predicted nice weather on Saturday and overcast chilly weather for Sunday and Monday, so we had tentatively planned to do the beach on Saturday. It was definitely not beachy weather.
We decided to head for the beach anyway, since we didn't know what Sunday and Monday would be like, so we hopped on a bus to head for Baker Beach, Jantine's favorite beach. As we went, the weather continued to not get nicer, and Baker Beach continued to not be close to anything else we wanted to do, so we changed course midway through the ride and decided to head for Golden Gate Park instead, so we could walk around the park, stop at Ocean Beach on the other side of the park, and basically do more stuff. There was a more direct way to Golden Gate Park from our hotel than the way we took, but it turned out fine and we didn't lose too much time.
It turns out that Golden Gate Park is a whole lot bigger than it looks on the map!! It's maybe four or five miles wide and a mile long. We weren't aware of this when we got off the bus around 19th Street. We walked all the way through the park, keeping toward the southern edge of it, and found that one of the last streets before you hit the water is, like, 48th. It's one long park. A very pretty park, but still. After emerging from the park we both had to use a bathroom like whoa, and there were no fast food places around at all. Even the one gas station's bathrooms were out of order. It was like a wasteland. The only place was this Thai cafe in a rundown hotel, and their sign said you had to order food if you wanted to use the bathroom. We split fries and a coke, and it turned out to be an okay little place (that reminded me of my Gammy's living room, in spite of the Thai decor). It was actually good to sit down for a few minutes after the big walk we'd just had.
After the fries, we headed for the beach! It was too cold to shed any actual clothing, so we just took off our shoes and socks to dip our toes in the water. This was the first time either of us had touched the Pacific, so we took a bunch of pictures. (We also called Dylan to get him to look something up on IMDB for us that we kept arguing about--turns out Don Rickles and Don Cheadle are totally different people.) We walked all the way up Ocean Beach along the western border of the park, maybe a mile. After we dried off our feet (with a towel I'd smuggled out of the hotel) we saw Cliff House up on the hill and thought we'd walk up there (and, of course, use their bathroom). Cliff House was pretty cool--apparently there's been a house there for around 150 years, as a place for travelers to stop as they went up the coast. There's a nice view there of Seal Rock.
After Cliff House, we decided to walk back down and into the other side of the park to try to find the bison pen. Yes, the bison pen. They keep bison right there in the park! So we headed back down into the park, walked around a really pretty lake, and finally saw the bison, just as it was starting to rain a bit. The bison were awesome, even if they were too far away from the fence for me to get really good pictures. Then we walked back up out of the park to its northern edge (all the directions I'm using, by the way, refer to the way the city looked on the map, and not necessarily to its actual orientation--wish I had the map with me, maybe it would say) and got on another bus. We were pretty hungry and thought we'd try a restaurant Jantine had recommended for dinner, Papalote, down on Valencia. We walked about eight blocks from where the bus dropped us off down Valencia, and by happy coincidence found several excellent bookstores! My favorite was the one that carried only fantasy and sci fi books, had a good used section in the back, and featured a hairless cat as one of its residents. I bought several books there.
Finally Jorn managed to drag me out of the bookstores and to the restaurant. We ate some fucking delicious Mexican food, let me tell you. We both got chicken quesadillas, with our traditional fixin's: sour cream for Jorn, and guacamole for me. Their salsa was also very good. Their soda case had some really interesting and different kinds of soda, including Leninade, which Jorn had to try (he said it was good and brought home a bottle for his friend Dan). Then I figured out that there was a bus that would take us right back to the train station on Market near our hotel, and we had to wait a while but the bus arrived and it took us right where it was supposed to. I think we fell asleep around 9:30pm. We walked a heck of a lot on Saturday.
Wow, it took me a while to type all of this out. I'll do the rest tomorrow, hopefully.
