San Francisco

On or about February 8th, Karen and I left San Francisco feeling slightly had. As I mentioned before, we had scheduled nearly a full week of our trip there, but we found it to be so expensive and angry that we cut our stay short in favor of taking off down the coast for Big Sur, Monterey and LA.

However, in fairness to SF, I need to observe that we did enjoy some things about our time there...

(there is a little Italian restaurant called L'Osteria del Forno that is absolutely fantastic, affordable, great service...truly a highlight)...

(our hotel, The Hotel San Remo, was extremely affordable, friendly and helpful service, beautifully appointed shared bathrooms, lots of European travelers...truly we cannot recommend this lovely place highly enough)...

(the Maritime Museum was a fantastic buy and allowed admission to restored antique sailing vessels)...

(Alcatraz was expensive but ultimately worth the price for the experience)...

...and there were others. Driving was not as bad as we were warned about. Perhaps having grown up within 40 minutes of Manhattan has seasoned me to compare all traffic "problems" with the Tri-State area. No matter how bad people say a given city's driving is, nothing ever does compare to the snarls of traffic I cut my teeth on.

The crookedest street in the world was definitely worth seeing:



I mean, honestly. What. Is. The. Point?!

The weather we had while we were there was unusually mild, and as you can see from our pictures, we were fortunate (especially for the winter) to have had lots of blue skies.



We saw lots of evidence that people were quite aggravated....nay, right pissed off about the re-election of Dubya.



While at the Maritime Museum, this sign caught my eye...thought it was quite a hilarious commentary on the differences between centuries ago America and today:



The docents at the Maritime Musuem were great. I talked to this guy for probably 45 minutes about this little turn of the last century marine motor - I want to say it was 5 horsepower, extremely slow revolutions, and surprisingly quiet - this particular specimen was employed up until the last few years in a large fishing trawler. Hit or miss engines are pretty much the first generation of internal combustion engines, and in my childhood I had the pleasure of restoring an old hit or miss washing machine motor. I still have it, believe it or not. Made for a fun conversation with this guy. He actually did this little dance when he would start the motor up. It was quite cute. :-)



We found San Francisco to be quite dirty and home to much more graffiti than the other cities we'd seen to date on this trip. However, some of the graffiti in the city revealed that there was still a sense of humor (at least among the graffiti "artists")...read this carefully:



There is a Sea Lion gathering place at Fisherman's Wharf. It's quite a tourist attraction as you might imagine...



They are a stitch to watch. Most of the sea lions here are males, and they spend their time trying to out-bark each other and push each other around to establish their dominance in the pecking order for the few females that are, er, "available":





We did end up taking the San Francisco Trolley from the waterfront partway to its final destination. When it broke down, we got off and started walking. Turns out we were able to at least keep abreast of its progress, and I think that we ended up beating it to its final destination.

Anyways, one of the good things about taking our aborted trolley ride was that we found these guys on our way to Chinatown.



By the way, if you go there, I think both Karen and I would agree: don't bother with the "famous" San Fran trolleys. They are overpriced, especially when compared with other modes of public transit readily available. They are slow. They are rickety. They go only from one place to one other place. And, you can get better pictures of them if you are NOT riding them. All great arguments for taking a pass on this "most San Franciscan" of San Francisco tourist traps.

Near the crookedest street, we found some interesting murals...



So, here endeth our tour of San Francisco. :-)

The Rock

And no, I'm not referring to a certain pro-wrestler-turned-movie-star by the name of Dwayne who plays a gay Samoan bodyguard in his latest outing in a poor sequel to one of the most brilliantly funny movies of the 1990s.

No, I'm talking about the first super prison built by our federal government. The site of one of the (mostly forgotten) Native American protests of the 1970s. The prison that was built to contain the worst of the worst: that is, if you pissed off the feds bad enough to land in a maximum security federal pen, and THEN you further dignified yourself by exasperating your warden there, Alcatraz is the place to which you would be sent.

After winding our way down from Seattle through Oregon and down the coast of northern California on the PCH, we ended up in San Francisco. Now, I've already expressed my displeasure with the denizens of that fine city in some of my earlier posts....but the fact is that there were definitely some good experiences to be had there.

One of those good experiences was at this fine example of our National Park system.

Here is a view of The Rock from Coit Tower (Coit Tower is on mainland SF):



You'll notice that Alcatraz is surrounded by the water of the San Francisco Bay. This sea water maintains a year round chilly 50 degrees F. We learned from our park ranger about the 50/50/50 rule: there is a 50 percent chance that you will survive for 50 minutes in 50 degree water. Thus the nearly perfect escape record of this prison.

This fact, oddly enough, does not stop otherwise perfectly normal San Franciscans from swimming in the Bay on a daily basis...brrrrrr.



On the ferry out to the island, you're treated to some great approach views:





Upon your arrival, you're greeted by this sign, and graffiti thankfully retained by the park service:



Then, you walk up the hill to the entrance:



When you reach the cell block area, there is a large patio area. When you walk to the city side of the island, you see why the Golden Gate Bridge (the superstructure of which is painted red, for the record) is so named:



Then, if you look to the left of the Golden Gate Bridge, you see one of the reasons people fall in love with San Francisco:



Then, as we made our way into the self-guided tour of the cell block, we were made aware of a whole host of reasons to steer clear of entanglements with the law:





Yep. I'm standing inside one of the solitary confinement cells. Creepy.

Here's a shot of some of the other buildings of the compound:



So there ya have it, my tour of Alcatraz.

Redwoods, at long last

OK, so here we go with the story of northern California's redwood forests. Remember that Karen and I are home now...these were taken back at the beginning of February... :-)

When you first drive through these hoary old forests, you start to understand where the imagery for JRR Tolkein's Mirkwood forest comes from. Even though, as far as I know, the man never set foot in northern CA, this place or one like it surely served as the inspiration for those stories. There is an ancient-ness here that defies description. Taking a step off the paved road of civilization, silence descends...sunlight streams through gaps in the dense cover of needles, and a sense of awe comes over me just as profound as standing at the summit of a Wasatch Mountain, or the Pacific coast.

You should know that even though I plan to show you some pictures, they truly cannot capture the majesty and scale of these wonderful forests. Anyways. Have a look:



I took this one standing *inside* the trunk of one of these monsters:



Here it is from the outside:



And a somewhat blurry shot of Karen standing inside this old man's trunk - for the sake of attempting to describe scale:



And here, look! It's the performance art of the litterati!



More to come...

Los Angeles

There has been some curiousity expressed regarding the job opportunity I was pursuing in Los Angeles. For a variety of reasons which I won't bore you with, they have elected not to move forward with hiring me for that position.

I keep telling myself that my dear higher power is saving me from potentially difficult situations for something better. I do continue to hope that this is the case.

In the meanwhile, if you're "the praying kind" please send out a prayer for us. We want to take advantage of our blessed break from the rat race...but also be mindful of opportunities to move into whatever is next on the agenda for us.

Peace -

Homeless

Well, the truth is that we have a better deal than any homeless person I've ever met (and yes, there have been several). While we no longer own our own house, there are a number of upsides. We have our wits yet (most of them anyway), neither of us has any degenerative disease, family and friends love us (most of the time) and we're currently squatting (we're calling it "house-sitting") in a house that is larger than ours was. It's half an hour north of Ann Arbor in a little town called Milford. Karen grew up in this house. Which is weird for her in its own right.

There is a hot tub.

There is a (real woodburning) fireplace.

We have essentially no expenses.

We got a big check at the end of the selling ordeal. Well, in truth, the check was normal "check-size". But there were more letters and numbers strung together on the "amount" line than I'm accustomed to.

This is what we call "counting our blessings". :-)

I'll be back soon with more pictures. I will be resuming our travelogue when I can get to a place that allows me to access broadband. :-)