Dyepot, Teapot

I’ve been home since Wednesday night, so it’s probably time to finish posting about the road trip and move on to something else.

Sunday night I had dinner in the Mission district, first tacos at Pancho Villa, then a dessert crepe at Ti Couz.

Monday morning was spent on laundry, as mentioned before. Then in the afternoon I headed to SOMA to see Citizen Space. It’s a nice office, comfortable place to catch up on email, and they seem very open to people dropping by.

After that, I took the cable car up to Lombard St.

Twisty as advertised.

Then back downtown to do a little shopping. I’ve been having some pants problems. I can’t find an exact duplicate of the ones I like that wore out, and I hate ordering things online only to discover that the sizing isn’t as expected. It’s really irritating how many places don’t stock their full size range in the store.

The Old Navy on Market has not just the XL and XXL sizes I’ve seen here in Portland, but an actual Women’s Plus section of the store, all the way up to 4X. They even had larger mannequins for the displays. So now I have two pairs of reasonably comfortable pants. The fit around the waist is a little weird, but not enough to be irritating.

Tuesday we started the drive back north, but first I had a couple hours free to explore Golden Gate Park. I spent most of it in the Botanical Garden.

Laurie and I loaded back into the car and started north along highway 101.

This went fairly smoothly, though we had some trouble getting back on the highway after stopping for food in Santa Rosa. The highway entrances and exits aren’t paired, and there are no signs directing you back to 101. Instead, they expect you to know the area well enough to follow the signs for highway 12, understanding that it overlaps with 101 through town. This is not very friendly to people just passing though.

We made it to the redwoods by dark, and camped at Richardson Grove State Park.

Scenic, but noisy. The year-round camping area is well within earshot of the highway.

Most of the rest of the trip was driving and driving and driving. With a couple of small detours, including an elk viewing area.

I had a really good time over the week I was gone, and I’m really happy that Laurie decided to take a road trip and asked if anyone wanted to come along. It was much fun.

And now I’m home, with too much to get done, and a really annoying cold I picked up at the hostel. Achoo.

I didn’t write a post yesterday, so now I have two days to catch up on. This might be long and picture-heavy.

I’m writing from a laundromat on O’Farrell called Joey’s. They serve ice cream, coffee, and sausages. The laundry prices seem competitive. And there’s wifi (yay!).

A few highlights from Saturday:

I started my day at the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market.

Then I took the streetcar to Pier 39.

A few piers down from there, I found a submarine.

Also:

Coin-operated gizmos.

My evening’s entertainment was dinner at Edinburgh Castle, which is a pub that serves fish & chips, delivered in paper wrappings from a little take-out place around the corner. There I met Derri, a canned-foods journalist from London, who was hanging out in SF for a couple of days after a conference. She was disappointed that the bartender had never heard of HP sauce or mushy peas. The fish & chips were authentically bland, but they have a decent selection of beer on tap.

Moving along to Sunday: my general plan was to go look at the bay some more, then wander through Japantown for a bit. The first part went as expected.

Fishermen, seagulls, a view of Alcatraz …

and people out for a swim?

This was about when I started wishing I could stay in town an extra week, go kayaking, check out SFMOMA, hang out at the beach getting sunburnt (oh wait already did that one). I’m on my last full day and there are still all sorts of things I’d like to do.

Next: Japantown. I had noticed a couple of things mentioning the Cherry Blossom Festival, but somehow I got it into my head that the festivities weren’t for another week.

I’m very happy to have been wrong about that. I spent two hours sitting around and watching the parade. There were kimonos. There were swords. There were cosplay outfits.

I even saw the mayor riding a Segway. (He hopped out of his car to ask the parade volunteer if he could try it, then zipped around the group in front of him at high speed. His security guys looked a little nervous about this.)

It was quite a party.

P.S. Can anyone tell me about the shrines several groups were carrying, like the one above? It seemed to be related to celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Osaka-San Francisco sister city relationship. There were about 6 different groups carrying these, each chanting something different, but since I don’t speak Japanese, I don’t know what they were saying.

I’ve traveled enough to learn that I need to walk around in a new place to get the geography clear in my head, because otherwise I feel lost and uncomfortable. So yesterday I walked from the hostel to Chinatown and back, then around again through the city center area. This worked; I feel like I know where I am now.

Chinatown was sort of under- and overwhelming at the same time. Grant Ave. had clusters of gawking tourists, cheap import shops, some interesting collectibles and antiques, and a lot of restaurants with people outside waving menu flyers.

Stockton has a different sort of crowdedness: little old Chinese men and women buying fresh fish and roast chickens and unidentifiable (to me) dried things. I had planned to get lunch in the area, but after wandering around a bit I realized I had no way to work out which restaurants were any good (having failed to write this info down before heading out), so instead I wandered into a bakery and bought a couple of buns. The yellow bean and ginger one was really interesting, but I couldn’t finish it. The unfilled pineapple bun worked out better.

Afterward, more wander wander until I was tired enough to come back to the hostel for a nap.

In the evening I met up with some of the Podcast Hotel crowd at the JPG Magazine gallery opening/party.

We hung out at the gallery for a while, then carpooled over to Velvet Cantina in the Mission for dinner. Lots of fun conversation with John, Alex, and Marshall about social media, reputation systems, and general internetty stuff.

Today’s plan is to go check out the market by the Ferry Building, then head up to Fisherman’s Wharf and Pier 39, after which I will probably want another nap and a shower. And then maybe I’ll crash the Podcast Hotel wrap party.

We made it to San Francisco safely. I am tired. Too much car.

But look, on the way we went to the beach:

We camped at the Umpqua Lighthouse State Park Wednesday night, then Thursday cut back over to I-5, and headed south until we were here. There may have been a little difficulty finding Highway 505 that resulted in going back over the same stretch of I-5 a couple times because you can only get to the entrance heading south. Maybe.

And now I’m at the City Center HI. We got in around 10:30 or 11. Slept okay, but the radiator in the room makes weird sloshy noises and I may have to try earplugs. There’s a lounge with tables and many outlets.

In a little while I’ll go see Chinatown.

I’m taking advantage of my really flexible no-office schedule to accompany a friend on a road trip to San Francisco. Neat things about this: I can’t remember the last time I decided to travel on ~3 days notice (and pulled it off), I’ve never been to SF, people I know from Portland will also be there for Podcast Hotel so maybe I can figure out how to meet up with them without paying the $50/day event registration fee, I’m bringing my camera (of course), and I expect to have ample access to wifi.

My plans involve a fair amount of sightseeing, so let me know if there’s anything I really should see or do (already have Chinatown, sea lions, that really twisty street…). Brewpubs? Bookstores? Bakeries? Yarn/fabric/etc?

I’ll be back a week from tomorrow, but expect to hear from me before then.