Day Sixteen - San Francisco... The City!

Today was San Francisco. Not a lot to write about, really.  Some highlights were the all vegetarian Chinese place. We also spent about 4 mins looking for a place to park only to realize that all city parking on Sundays is free. What luck.

We first tried to drive down Lombard Street, but I took a wrong turn and wound up on an old Army base that they want to turn into condos. Hey! Let's tear down history and build over-priced housing  for white people who drive hummers and have nannies.

Anyway, our only plan for the day was to find a certain vegetarian Asian restaurant. We drove past it, since the directions we got were pretty good, but parking was pretty bad. On a few streets, the cars were parked two-deep. We kept seeing this and were pretty well just flabbergasted. But it turns out that on Sundays, for church, they park you in. I guess too many people were leaving mid-sermon.

Finally, we found "free" parking. One crazy guy with a cart told us that this was a bad neighborhood and that we shouldn't park here. He wasn't mean or protective about it, just being nice. Another crazy guy in a stupid shirt told us that it was free on Sundays. We, of course, didn't believe him. Then we found a sane guy and he had no idea if the place was actually free, but he had been parked there all morning. So we took the chance.

However, we were so far away from the Asian place that we were basically lost in one of the worst parts of San Francisco. This statement deserves and explanation. Yes, it was the worst part of San Francisco, but it really wasn't all that bad. A bunch of homeless, some street urine and that's about it. We never felt threatened or even too out of place.

We walked around part of the Tenderloin for maybe about 30 minutes, then stumbled onto the vegetarian place, almost accidentally.

The food was really good and I took a bunch of pictures of the girls eating.  Almost all the food there was fake meat. I got a beef teriyaki with shrimp. Good, but kinda creepy too.

Back on the street and an attempt to find the car. Not so bad, we did remember the streets where we parked. On our way back, there was a bearded street-dweller who was in the middle of the road and traffic was beginning to get backed up. The driver closest to him honked his horn, the man looked up, raised his arms and shouted "I WILL SURVIVE!"

And so he has survived another day.

We found the car and decided it would be a cool thing to find the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets. Nikki and Ashley had no idea why and even after we explained it to them, they really didn't get it. I just wanted to see what it looked like now. 

This took up the bulk of our time, and though it turned out that we were only a few blocks away from it, we drove almost the entire city before relenting and buying a map. Imagine our giggles when we discovered just how close we were! It was nice seeing the city though.

One of the things that I really wanted to do was drive up Lombard Street. We sat waiting in traffic on a hill that went straight up. When  a car would get sick of waiting and would turn around and go straight back down the hill, the rest of the cars would pull forward. But when I'd let off the brake, my car would drift backwards. So it was a race between my foot and gravity. If I would lose out to physics, the guy behind me would be none-too-pleased. I wasn't really used to this, and I hit the gas hard, making my tires squeal each time. It was funny at first, but since this was happening quite a lot, it got old. On my part, it was just a nervous reaction to the possibility that we could drift backwards into the bay. And, as Bill Cosby said, "If you drift backwards into the Bay, you can't go to heaven. You go up and see Saint Peter and he asks, 'how'd you die?' 'Oh me and a Volkswagon drifted backwards into the Bay.' 'YOU GO TO HELL!'"

Not wanting that fate for any of us, I turned onto the next street and will try Lombard Street some other time.

We finally found Haight and Ashbury and it was mostly depressing.  Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream had one corner, The Gap had another. Some trendy clothing store and a cafe. There was one shop just down the street that sold Haight & Ashbury tourist stuff, but we hit the Anarchist Bookstore. We all picked up something, Ashley got a book on animal ingredients in food and a book about skating. I got a cookbook and two travel books. Cole got some zines and Nikki got some smaller books.

There was a cool record store next door, but nothing to buy. Nikki wanted stockings because her legs were cold, so we stopped at this ridiculously overpriced glorified thrift store. This is the kind of cool retro store that scours regular thrift stores for cool retro clothing and then sells them back to us at four times the cost. Robbery. They had a back room (called the Meat Locker) where they featured clothing that they altered themselves. For example, there was a white button down dress shirt that they added a zipper too (on the side), some spray painted words and a few other "punk rock" touches. The price tag: $100. This is why we should really consider having a maximum wage as well as a minimum.

I took a bunch of pictures before reading the sign that asked customers not to take pictures. Then I took a bunch after that too. I always thought that it was a stupid rule. It's really an anti-theft thing. When people want to case a joint, they'll take pictures first (so they say). No one asked me to stop, but still, stupid rule.

Nikki bought purple and pink striped stockings and we went about our way. Back to the car and quickly found our way out of the city. We had a map now, this would be easy. And it was! Woo!

Once back in Santa Rosa, Nikki and I ate Indian take out (I love this place) and we settled down for the night.

All-in-all, a really really great day.

Stats
Miles traveled today: 149
Hours on the road: n/a
Miles traveled in total: 5556

Pictures
Pictures from Eric's Camera.
No epics from Ashley today.

Where are we?
Map showing where we are today!
(Purple = where we've been. Red = where we traveled today.)