If you’re going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you’re going to San Francisco
You’re gonna meet some gentle people there
For those who come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there
In the streets of San Francisco
Gentle people with flowers in their hair
All across the nation
Such a strange vibration
People in motion
There’s a whole generation
With a new explanation
People in motion
– Scott McKenzie
Sunday 11 June 2023
The three hours of sleep I had overnight was not nearly enough. Very hard to wake up so early after more than my fair share of Bud Light last night. Not much I could do about it, though. We had an early flight – read: cheap – out to San Francisco, a city I love, but have not visited since 2017.
I’ve had some interesting travel situations this trip – lost luggage, unclean Airbnb – and added another to the list at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, when the check-in kiosk we were using to get our boarding passes and baggage tags decided to give up the ghost halfway through. So we had to get the attention of a United employee who helped us move to another kiosk.
Then we had a long wait to go through security, where they had a K9 unit in action prior to the usual passport checks and carry-on baggage through the x-ray machine rigmarole. All in all, it was a bit of a saga, and we made it to our gate just in time to board the plane to San Francisco. That meant no breakfast beforehand, which wasn’t ideal. Thankfully, I purchased a small breakfast snack on the plane to tide me over until we landed in SF at about 9:30am local, getting an Uber from the airport into downtown, past a suburb called Brisbane!
To say we left behind the warm weather and sunshine back in the Midwest is actually an understatement. It was cold and windy and mostly cloudy, with temperatures in the high teens (degrees Celsius), which definitely isn’t what you might expect from even Northern California in the summer. Apparently not unusual this early into summer here, but still not what we were hoping for. Nonetheless, I forgot how beautiful San Francisco is. The bay, the parks, everything. And quite similar in some respects in certain parts of the city to Sydney.
After a late breakfast/early lunch at a generations-old Italian restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf, we took an Uber along the waterfront, under the Bay Bridge (that connects San Francisco with the port city of Oakland, California) to Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants Major League Baseball team who were playing the Cubs this afternoon, a perfect 1:05pm pitch, the clouds clearing in time, replaced by bright sunshine.
Oracle sits right on the waterfront, and is one of the parks on my MLB Bucket List. Cool to tick it off that list, and even cooler to see the Giants win 13-3, including a Joc Pederson home run into right field. Actually, it went out of the stadium and into McCovey Cove, where people in kayaks linger, hoping to get a ball. It was the one hundred and first time someone has hit a homer into McCovey Cove, and the stadium was opened more than twenty years ago. So, a fairly rare event that is kind of legendary in baseball, and we got to see it first go.
Dinner at Applebee’s tonight. Easy and tasty food. Back to the hotel by 7:00pm. Struggling to keep my eyes open as I type. I know I’m going to have a good, long sleep tonight!
kitchtrips 