My companions, two thirteen-year-old girls, were standing on the cable car’s running boards, each with an arm around a carrousel-like pole. We crested the hill and were greeted by a spectacular view of San Francisco Bay. As we hurtled downhill, Cheshire cat smiles spread across the girls’ faces. This was as good as any roller coaster ride in an amusement park. In fact, this may have been the inspiration for such thrilling rides.
San Francisco had never made it to my “must see” list. Perhaps it was dozens of transits through the San Francisco airport when it was being renovated that squashed my natural curiosity about people and places. But my granddaughter had chosen this port city for our biennial trip and invited a friend to join us. Pre-research had established a menu of nearly twenty things the girls and I might like to see. I was pleasantly surprised to discover how easy it was to get around with the municipal passes I’d purchased for us. Now she and her friend were helping me discover San Francisco’s magic.
The weather cooperated – not raining, not hot, not cold, in other words, as Goldilocks would say, “just right.” Immediately upon arrival, a visit to Chinatown transported us into another world, as did Golden Gate Park on our second day.
We found our way to the park all right, but my notoriously bad sense of direction resulted in an accidental tour of Stow Lake and our first full views of the bay and Golden Gate Bridge. After contemplating raked pebbles and old rocks in the Japanese Tea Garden, my granddaughter announced, “I really want to go to Japan.”
The weather cooperated – not raining, not hot, not cold, in other words, as Goldilocks would say, “just right.” Immediately upon arrival, a visit to Chinatown transported us into another world, as did Golden Gate Park on our second day.
We found our way to the park all right, but my notoriously bad sense of direction resulted in an accidental tour of Stow Lake and our first full views of the bay and Golden Gate Bridge. After contemplating raked pebbles and old rocks in the Japanese Tea Garden, my granddaughter announced, “I really want to go to Japan.”
We proceeded to the De Young Museum to view a traveling exhibition of Picasso works. What a thrill to see the ongoing evolution of this master artist – from early unremarkable sketches to studies for major paintings, to fully realized works of art. The only thing that could have made it more amazing would have been the presence of Guernica. We were likewise captivated by the Inuit, Mesoamerican, and Northwest contemporary glass art in Art of the Americas. We went be bed that night sated on beauty, tempura and sushi.
We had tickets to see a matinee performance of Billy Elliott, the musical, downtown on Market Street on our third day. I suggested we fit in the Bali exhibit at the nearby Asian Art Museum before the show and my companions agreed. Art, Ritual, Performance is the first full museum exploration of Balinese culture in America. But as I watched a video of the Monkey Dance, I was aware of how far it was from the real experience of smelling the incense, feeling the body heat, and being mesmerized by the vibrations of gamelan music.
Reemerging into the sunlight, we made our way to the second balcony of the Orpheum theatre. For the next two and a half hours we were in England during the mining strike that resulted in Margaret Thatcher shutting down the industry. (90% of England’s coal today is imported from the Ukraine – good for Ukraine, bad for England.) Billy, his miner dad, his ballet teacher, and his friend Michael tugged at our hearts. Although the girls said they could have cried, I was the only one who did.
We decided to top off the day with dinner at the Zuni Café, a few blocks from the Orpheum Theatre. With directions from one of the girls’ parents, we found the triangle-shaped restaurant about half an hour before the dinner menu would be served. A local pianist arrived and began playing as my granddaughter took over as hostess for the evening. Her dad had given her money to take us out for dinner. She graciously paid for our before-dinner sodas and haystack of shoestring potatoes, but blanched when she saw the dinner menu prices. Not to worry, we stayed within budget. She proudly accepted the bill, figured the tip, and sighed with satisfaction as she closed the folder over the required amount of cash.
Venturing back out to Market Street to catch a streetcar home, the wind kept the girls busy, holding down their dresses. Back at the hotel, as we settled down to read before falling asleep, we deemed our cosmopolitan day a grand success.
For our last two days, we decided to do normal touristy things like Ghirardelli Square for an ice cream soda and the cable car ride that landed us at the top of the most crooked street in the world. After descending Lombard Street and since we had stood in line for an hour and a half that morning for tickets to Alcatrazz, which we were eight people away from getting, we stopped midday at our hotel to rest before heading for Golden Gate Bridge.
Now I must tell you about our charming hotel. The San Remo was built in 1906, in North Beach, after the earthquake. It has twice been restored to its Victorian origins and is complete with pull chain toilets and shower rooms, down the hall, of course, from our sleeping room. No TV or phone in the room, but computer access in the upstairs lobby, WIFI available, and the friendliest most helpful attendants imaginable. It brought back memories of the pensions in which I stayed on my first trip to Europe.
The girls really didn’t get why we were going to walk on the Golden Gate Bridge, but they humored me. And from the moment we stepped onto the bridge, they experienced the awesome nature of walking in the clouds. The sun lighted portions of the distant shoreline and wind surfers drifted by beneath us. As we walked to the first tall suspension post, we felt the exhilaration mountain climbers must know when they reach the summit, the top of the world. Despite the chilly wind, we were reluctant to turn back. “Next time,” they declared, “we’ll walk all the way across to Sausalito.”
As we returned to the hotel that evening, I asked, “How badly do you ladies want to go to Alcatraz? To get tickets will require being in line by 6:00 in the morning.” They decided it was worth getting up at 5:30 on our final day. Now it was Grandma’s turn to humor them. Next morning, after two and a half hours of standing on concrete and munching on Fig Newton cookies, we got tickets for the first sailing. Twenty minutes to grab a muffin and use the bathroom and we headed for the ferry. For me, the ferry ride back and forth was the high point, but the girls were fascinated by the cellblock audio tour.
We decided to end our San Francisco adventure the same way we began it – in Chinatown. One girl bought six pashmini scarves for twenty dollars, the other bought a dramatic, floppy sun hat. We stopped for thin crust pizza at a “best in San Franciso” Italian restaurant before buying ice cream cones and heading to the San Remo to get some sleep before a 4:45 morning wake up. The girls had an 8:00 am flight back to Toronto.
We had tons of fun in San Francisco and the girls pronounced it a “great trip.” But for me the memorable part will be our dinner conversations about friendship: what is a real friend, do your friends have to be like you, how do you make friends, what does it mean to be a friend, could our talents of singing and guitar playing help us make friends. As with the cable car perched at the top of the hill, these two girls are plunging downhill, into their first year of high school. I declare them ready.
