DAY NINETEEN
After visiting some picturesque towns on the Oregon/California coast, it was time to get back on the open road and head down to another major city — this time San Francisco. We had three days planned in the ‘City by the Bay’ and it was definitely one of the spots that we had been most anticipating throughout all our planning.
During the journey, Cai felt so inspired by her surroundings that she wrote a poem:
(Given the eloquence of Cai’s poetry in comparison to this blog, the eagle eyed reader may be able to guess the author narrating our trip…)
After a long morning drive, we decided to visit Bodega Bay — most famous (at least to film buffs) as the setting for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. We sat in the back of our SUV eating our lunch and looking out over the bay that Tippi Hedren once sailed across.
We didn’t have enough time to try and recreate the sequence ourselves (known in these parts as ‘doing a Zizek‘ ) but we did go for a coffee in a great local cafe that were advertising a signing by Tippi Hedren in a couple of weeks time.
Increasingly aware of the swarms of birds in the sky, though, we decided it was best to get back on the road.
Soon enough we were traveling over the distinctive Golden Gate bridge. Disappointingly we were not attacked by Godzilla, an army of intellgent apes, or the ‘Mega Shark’ from Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. Sometimes films lie to you.
The place we were staying in San Francisco was described as a ‘cottage’ on AirBnB which says more about our hosts’ love of quaint English decorating than its size or layout, but the apartment was a perfect place to stay while exploring San Francisco. When we arrived, Ken showed us around and offered recommendations of local restaurants and sights to visit. It is in the hip Mission area and very close to the Bart station for getting around SF, and (perhaps more importantly for our purposes) it had its own parking space that was big enough to fit our car — something that we had discovered was increasingly rare in SF.
We were staying in The Mission district, an area that had previously been known for its significant Central and South American population but had more recently become increasingly gentrified. Our first taste of this was at Ken’s recommended local restaurant — La Taqueria.
Having won many awards for its tacos and burritos (and perhaps more importantly, having a very high Yelp and Trip Advisor score), La Taqueria was clearly a local institution as evidenced by a queue that snaked out into the street early on a Wednesday evening. Also, as evidenced by the following photograph, it was something of a hipster mecca.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that this blog could have been subtitled ‘Iain and Cai’s tour of hipster America’ and the content would have been pretty much the same…