Road Tripping: Day 20: San Francisco Bay Area

We’re way behind on the bloggage front due to poor Internet connections and too little energy to write at the end of the day. I apologize for being so far behind.

On Thursday, July 2, 2009, Dave and I met up with Chad and Whitney in Oakland to get their perspective of the Bay Area. Chad is a San Fran native, so he had great input on what we were seeing. He was even able to give us some bits of Byrne family history as he pointed out things his folks had done around the town. It was pretty great.

We picked Chad and Whit up at the place where they are currently staying with some friends. We were in our van with no back seats and they have no car, so don’t tell Mom, but they sat in the back on our mattress with NO SEATBELTS! AAAAHHHHHHHHH! There was no way to go more than 4 mph in the city anyhow and they were surrounded by pillows and blankets, so they were fairly safe.

We began by heading down toward Haight-Ashbury so we could see what spendy places had moved into the area to capitalize on America’s fascination with the '60s. We began with Whit pointing out Phuket Thai. Always good for a joke.

Then, we were off to Haight-Ashbury. There it is.

And there it goes.

The Red Vic Movie House on Haight Street had a pretty great photo board out front.

That’s Chad with a moustache tattoo covering up his real moustache.

As we went by Golden Gate Park, we spotted this little bit of weirdness:

What’s up, Buffalo Paddock in San Fran?! HEEEEYYYY! Chad was so excited about it that he said we could use this experience as a bit of trivia: "When someone asks, 'Are there buffalo in San Francisco?' you can say 'Yes.'" Whit pointed out that no one is likely to just jump out and ask me a question like that. It was worth a pretty good laugh, though.

Then, as we headed to Cliff House, the point where the bay meets the ocean, we found this little Dutch windmill tucked away in the park.

A plaque at the site indicates that the presence of this windmill on the property was only possible through the generous contributions of a gal named Eleanor Ross Crabtree.

Below such a lofty statement is the quote "Her dream has become a reality." I thought this was a pretty weak dream, and then Chad found that there were some weird holes in the walls of the windmill which had been bricked up. This, of course, led to the realization of there being a hole in Ms. Crabtree’s dream. Again, a good laugh was had by all. An unreasonably good laugh. You had to be there.

From Cliff House, we found ourselves looking down on the "ruins" of the Sutro Baths that had existed there on the coast fed by ocean water that had, essentially, just been bricked in from the beach.

They were first opened in 1896 as some lunatic idea of the mayor at the time. We gathered that the containment of these waters in a shallow pool would have likely made them much warmer than just swimming in the ocean.

Cliff House itself was not quite as impressive. The upper level was just a ritzy-schmitzy, tourist-trap restaurant, and the lower level was the Musee Mecanique, a private collection of coin-operated toys and games from amusement facilities of yore. Unfortunately, it had been moved to one of the piers at Fisherman’s Wharf a few weeks before.

We also found this old Camera Obscura novelty stand which offered to show us the view of Seal Rock inside a darkened room for $3 a person. I pointed out that I was already looking at Seal Rock and could not afford to see indoors what I was already seeing outdoors. For the record, Seal Rock was seal-less that day. Nothing but boids. Dirty, stinkin', flea-ridden boids.

From Cliff House, we headed to the Golden Gate Bridge for the adventure we didn’t get to have with Susan and the boys. It was still fun, though. I can’t get over what an incredibly beautiful structure it is. The color of the bridge is called “International Orange,” and it is in the process of being painted 365 days a year. As soon as painters are done painting the whole thing, it’s time to start over because of the harshness of the wind and salt.

This is our latest entry in the Theater of Weird Signs.

This guy was paddle boarding down in the bay below the bridge. It looked terribly boring until we finally saw him catch a wave out there.

This qualifies as the creepiest thing I saw on the bridge.

The sign to the right of the Emergency Phone reads , “Crisis Counseling: There is hope. The consequences of jumping from this bridge are fatal and tragic.” Whitney said that about 35 or 40 people jump off the bridge per year. We noticed that, strangely, there is only a high fence over the part of the bridge that is over land but not over water. There is a current plan to put a steel and plastic net under the bridge to save jumpers.

We only walked as far as the first tower. It was very windy and pretty chilly, and there were TONS of pedestrians and cyclists on the bridge.

These are the two big chickens of our quartet. Notice how they stand against the tower, away from the railing.

After I pointed out how amazing the view up to the top of the tower was...

I saw Dave white-knuckling the walls as he looked up. I’m impressed he even walked out on the bridge at all. He was really brave. The situation, however, was not ameliorated for him when I cavalierly pointed out that, every few feet, there was a drainage hole in the concrete about the size of a Kennedy half-dollar that was open to the bay below:

We found this delightful gardening display at the entrance to the Bridge.

After we oohed and ahhed about the bridge for a while, we then, I think, headed to Amoeba Records so Dave could get a taste of the most enormous record store we’d been to in a long time. We could only stay for about 40 minutes, so Dave couldn’t even begin to investigate the vinyl. Poor thing.

We also, at some point, went to Aquarius Records for fun. It was much smaller, but was like CD Alley in Chapel Hill in its tastes. Nifty.

We drove through the Castro for a quick minute. We were all starving, so we headed to the Mission for lunch at one of Whitney and Chad’s favorite restaurants: Puerto Alegre.

Here, I ate a carne asada burrito the size of my head and Dave had some kind of combo platter.

I think I had one too many margaritas, so I spent the next hour a little giggly. (Apparently, I was not alone.)

I talked about Lombard Street and how steep it is in a previous post. Well, we found another example of a street that has stairs instead of a sidewalk:

We didn’t go over to it, but it was still pretty easy to tell that I was glad I didn’t live there.

Dave was curious when he saw this place, the Hungry I Club.

Apparently, this is one of those places where folks like Bob Newhart, Mort Saul, Lenny Bruce, and folk and jazz groups used to perform in the 1950s. Now, it’s apparently a strip club. Good job, guys.

We took a quick pass by China Town, which was pretty cool, but we didn’t get to see any ducks hanging in shop windows or anything like that. We pretty much stayed on the perimeter.

My photo of the China Town gates turned out quite poorly as well because the vehicle was moving.

At the end of the afternoon, we went to City Lights Books, which is the leftist book store/publishing company started by Lawrence Ferlinghetti back in the 1950s. It was wonderful. I was in book heaven! I bought a few things that I thought were best bought there including a book documenting the freedom of speech trial over Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (to add to my collection of books about "Howl") and one of Ferlinghetti’s books about Poetry as an art form. He’s still out there publishing and editing as far as I know. This was quite a treat for me. I could have sat in there reading books for the rest of my life. I hated to leave. It just smelled so good in there--like old books and knowledge!

After that, we headed to a place in San Fran called "The Lab" where our friend Chuck Johnson was going to be doing a public performance of his Master’s Thesis in Music Composition. When we got there, we ran into our friend Amy who had just moved to Berkeley from Durham four days before. It was very weird to be in a room with Chuck, Amy, Whit, and Chad and NOT be in Durham or Chapel Hill. Very strange.

Chad and Whit headed home before the set began—their loss. :) Chuck’s set was pretty great. He had a young woman playing violin, a fellow student playing a pitched metal bar attached to a hollow box built by one of Chuck’s friends, another young lady playing the “long stringed instrument” built by the same gent, and Chuck with his bleeps and blips. It was pretty fantastic to see Chuck’s work come to fruition there, even if it was an encore presentation.

The next set was the pitched bar guy with his twin brother, both on laptops playing what sounded like a composition entirely composed of individual sounds from early Atari video games.

It was wacky. I wish we could have seen what was happening on their screens. Every once in a while, one of them would snicker, then the other would snicker, and we had no idea what was going on.

The final set was performed by one of Chuck’s professors on keyboard and laptop, another gentleman on an instrument he invented called a "Scatch Box," and a drummer who played with Sonic Youth at some point. It was pretty cool. The drummer was doing a lot of experimental “hairy eyeball” stuff (extended technique), as we call it in the SOC Rovers. He was fun to watch.

I talked to the Scatch Box guy after the show. He had built these boxes out of leftover keyboard boxes from a computer upgrade in his office.

He glued all of these combs, pieces of plastic and metal, and strips of grip tape and sandpaper to the box, put a small sound hole in the top, and placed a contact mic underneath. Then, he played it with a comb that he dragged over the textures like he was combing his hair. That technique he calls "scatching" as opposed to “scratching” which is what you do when you make a part in your hair. Very interesting. He was happy to let the music nerds in the house test it out. What a nice guy!

We said goodbye to Chuck,