I went for a walk today to assure my legs that they are not redundant after yesterday’s Segway tour. I wandered through Soma and Mission, stopped for an ice cream at Mitchell’s and then climbed Twin Peaks before descending to stroll through Golden Gate Park. The walk up is pretty tiring but you can drive (or be driven) most of the way up.
I got all the way down to the beach and the Dutch Windwill but was exposed to the wind that almost blew me from the summit of Twin Peaks earlier. It felt like my legs were being sandblasted so I hightailed it back along Fulton to the Civic Center. All told I clocked up over 17 miles today.
I really like San Francisco but I don’t think that I could ever live here. Building a city on a major fault line just seems to be fundamentally flawed to me.
I planned on going up Coit Tower yesterday but I simply ran out of time. Accordingly, it was item number one on today’s agenda before going to look at San Francisco’s crookedest street: Lombard street. It reminded me of the start of Nacimiento road but in daylight and maybe only a couple of hundred yards long. I ended up in the Ghiradelli area and the Franklin Bowles galleries looking at Dali’s Alice in Wonderland suite, some Rembrandt etchings and a large collection of amazing work from LeRoy Neiman.
As I was in San Francisco I couldn’t just hire a bike for a quick whizz round. I simply had to try out a Segway tour. They are the weirdest thing at first but you soon get used to them (that is unless you are the woman who ran herself over with hers during the orientation and decided she didn’t want to go anymore). The tour lasted for a couple of hours, was good fun and quite informative but once I dismounted it was like I’d forgotten how to walk normally. I went for a sit down in the Boudin Bakery to recover and have something to eat before heading back to the hotel for the night.
