Lately I’ve been struggling with some bigger questions in life. One friend suggested that I keep my mind open to “signs.” In my walking through San Francisco I found two bits of street art that might be signs. I almost missed both of them. These seem to be positive messages but possibly having various interpretations…
Of course I also found a few other bits of street art from which I derived no meaning but still liked.
My feet are tired and parts of them are swollen. I must have walked at least six miles on Friday. The 2011 WTS International Conference in San Francisco was wrapping up and I had several hours before my flight back to Denver. From the Embarcadero, I walked to Union Square then up to Nob Hill then through Chinatown to Coit Tower then back through Chinatown to the Hayes Valley district then up Market Street back to the hotel and my luggage.
It was a solo travel day for me. I’m still getting used to going to some famous sight or another and just enjoying it with myself. As a person just out of a looooong-term relationship (that I was in from quite a young age), I’ve always had someone to turn to and say, “wow, isn’t this amazing?” (or whatever the case may be). Now I just look and take in and move on. I’m doing ok with this solitary enjoyment of things. It’s peaceful.
One thing that you may notice, this singlehood travel deal means there are almost no pictures of me – just pictures of what I see. I haven’t quite gotten the hang of asking random people to photograph me…
Ok, a tiny bit of nerdy transit stuff - streetcars!
While at the WTS Conference, I took the F-line streetcar mobile tour. As you may or may not know, San Francisco purchased vintage streetcars from around the world, restored them, and have them in service on their streets. They are beautiful and are an excellent complement to historic San Francisco. The is the streetcar vehicle in which we toured:
The interiors are even restored:
The rest of the WTS Conference was filled with technical and professional development sessions, an awards banquet, an opening reception, and so on. All of these events were made especially fun by the company of my fellow WTS Colorado ladies.
I did have one non-WTS night out! My friend and co-worker, Pat, put me in touch with two of his friends – Evan and Hassan. They did an excellent job of entertaining me and took me out in the Mission to do something we all enjoy – beer drinking (and good beer too!). We went to the Monk’s Kettle and Zeitgeist (self-proclaimed as San Francisco’s #1 beer garden), both cool places. A sample of the fantastic beer menu at the Monk’s Kettle is below.
We also went to an historic building/bar at the end of the evening but that place is a bit fuzzy in my memory. We did, however, get a group photo taken there:
Here are a few of my views from my solo city touring day:
As you can tell from these photos, I was lucky to have nearly perfect weather in San Francisco.
This is the view at sunset:
In an early blog post I mentioned my privileged life - this is yet another example but the stay spoiled me.
The trip to Sausalito was on Tuesday afternoon - the last sunny afternoon of the week. I did get this photo of the Golden Gate Bridge and some evening clouds moving into the city:
Shortly after we returned to the mainland it started to rain. The next two days were spent walking through SF in the rain. Here is me on the way to Lombard Street (the popular, twisty-turny section), it's a steep uphill for three blocks - this picture is meant to convey the angle (but you can see how wet my pant legs are - by the end of the day it would be soaked to the knee):
That was San Francisco for us.
