Fernanda & Karl - Road Trip, Day 23 -- Website by Now Interactive Solutions

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Sunday, September 9, 2007

Road Trip, Day 23

Dinner at Pluto's in Sunset, San Francisco
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San Francisco

Our last zero mile day. We spent the day relaxedly, bumming around the city, doing some shopping. We bought three-day passes for the public transportation back when we got here. It includes buses, subways, street cars, and most importantly, the cable cars, which otherwise would cost 5 bucks a pop. So our city transportation needs are taken care of, Castro St. happens to be the end of the line for the street car, has a subway station, and of course has various buses.

So after yet another late start, we got underway. We took a street car to Union Square (with a stop in the middle to try and get to a comic book store which turned out to be closed -- I'd love to find some Lucky Luke comics to show Fernanda). We were going to hop on the cable car from there, but a side trip to another comic book store (no luck) took us to within sight of the Chinatown gate, so we went there instead, then caught the cable car from there. We rode it to the end of the line on California St., and got out there. We had lunch at a nice sushi place. We strolled around checking out the shops. There was a discount linens store, and we ended up buying three sets of California King size sheets, since we have a California King bed, and sheets for it are hard to find in our neck of the woods. So now we were lugging a huge bag of sheets, so we decided to go back to the car and ditch them. The car had been parked some distance from Castro, and we estimated the best way to get there by bus. We took the J subway, which turns into a street car when it emerges from underground. We got real lucky, in that it stopped literally three cars away from our car.

We dropped off the sheets, got the J going the other way, got out at Embarcadero, and caught the cable car from there, transfered to the Taylor St. line cable car -- our public transportation mojo was good, the street cars were there when we needed them, they stopped for us, they weren't crowded. Fernanda wanted to go back to Fisherman's Wharf, even though I was getting sick to death of this tourist area, so like any other "pier" tourist area in any city by any body of water. But she led me through the crab market, which was kind of cool, and we walked by the World War II museum ships, then to Ghirardelli chocolate square, before finally catching a bus to take us to Golden Gate park.

(We were at a stop we thought the bus we needed would be stopping at, but after a similar bus blew by without stopping, we asked the driver of another bus we knew went in the wrong direction if our bus stopped here. He said it stopped up two blocks on Van Ness, and told us to get on. He didn't know we had passes; he was just being very nice and taking two lost tourists to the proper bus stop! The real San Francisco is alive and well.)

The entrance to Golden Gate park we walked through looked kind of shady, with all these grungy people hanging around, encamping in the park. Fernanda was not a happy camper. Turns out there had been some kind of thing happening at the park; they were just disassembling the port-a-potties and cleaning up when we got there, with a remnant group of hippy-wanna-bes still playing the drums and not bathing together. The first impression that the park had totally gone to seed was not a true one; the tennis courts were nearly full of yuppies playing tennis, the children's playground was full of kids and their parents, but Fernanda's comfort level was shot, so we exited the park at random, and found ourselves in what the map identified as the Sunset neighborhood. And right at sunset, too! We followed the thin trail of restaurants deep into the heart of this area, which was brimming with shops and restaurants and people. Fernanda was happy again. While she chose a place to eat, I went into a used book store: they had a ton of Asterixes and Tintins, but no Lucky Luke.

We ate at a trendy place called "Plutos", which had a space theme, but really was a Panera-like sandwich plus shop. We returned home early, but I didn't get to sleep till after midnight again, because of how &%@ing long the actual process of writing takes. I only got yesterday's entry done, I'm doing today's early tomorrow (which is to say now). Whatever.

Tomorrow it's back on the road.

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Previous Entries

:-(
06/19/21

Açores
08/29/18

Our New Bathroom Saga
11/17/16

Europe 2015
03/16/15

The Berkshires
10/18/14

Road Trip South
03/23/13

Greece!
07/26/12

Our Trip to Ireland
08/09/09

Google Map of our Trip
09/17/07