MEANDERING & CATCHING UP IN SF (Cheri)

I wrote about going to the de Young Museum a few days ago.  After seeing the art, we started walking up towards the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, soaking in the glorious breeze and bright sun!

This was just after gazing across the view at the Academy of Sciences and its amazing living roof:

(Image Credit:  https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60713-d117078-Reviews-California_Academy_of_Sciences-San_Francisco_California.html

We have already toured the roof of that building, but I would happily do it again!

Saturdays are the ideal day to visit Golden Gate Park, because almost all of the streets are closed to automobile traffic.  (Pro tip that we didn't think of until too late:  if you are taking a ride service, like Waymo or Lyft, have it drop you off on the outer edge of the Park and walk in, because the roads that aren't closed are extremely congested.)

Truly, it was hard to believe that it was August.  I kept thinking March, or maybe April, because that's when it would be so cool if we were in North Carolina.

There was a duet a ways away, amplifying a slightly metallic, but still slow and captivating version of "Killing Me Softly With His Song" across the breeze.  Unfortunately I couldn't catch the audio on my phone.

There were sculptures in the middle of a closed-off street:

and I became the "I" in one of them:

We'd driven by this building the day before, and it had caught my eye.  It houses Ted & Al's Service Center, but the architecture didn't seem right for a garage.  I got the picture and looked it up at the end of the day.

Well, my intuition was wrong.  Here's a picture of the building from "back in the day," a garage from the beginning.

(Image Credit:  http://www.tedandalservice.com/history.html)

Rumors of the death of the bookstore are overblown.  We saw two independent bookstores in one block on Haight Street, and another a block away.

I'm often looking down when we are walking, and I saw this at the corner of Page and Cole Streets.

I can't tell you what type of trees were highlighting the sidewalks with their dried petals.  (Not bottle brush, which was my original guess.)

Eventually we caught a Waymo ride, to meet our high-school classmates Bev and Wendell Edwardsen at Goat Hill Pizza,  a neighborhood joint that serves the best pizza, on sourdough crusts.

Since it was the middle of the afternoon, we were able to sit in a quiet back room for something like three hours!  Bev and Wendell are like us, high-school sweethearts.  There were actually five couples in our 180-person senior class that got married, and four are still together.

The "Goat Hill" portion of the name is a reference to the actual goats that grazed on the very steep, formerly-empty lot behind the restaurant (actually the location of that back room that we ate in).  The goats' hoofprints were saved in the sidewalk concrete, almost destroyed recently, but luckily saved and re-installed.  (A great story!)

I've been eating at Goat Hill Pizza for about 20 years, but that meal was one of the best I've had . . . great food, good friends, great memories.