Waking up yesterday to a foggy morning with a bit of wind coming up, I decided the conditions weren't perfect enough to risk trying to e-bike up to Mt. Tam and back. I still wanted to go for a ride, though, so I figured I'd ride a route through the Haight down to Union Square, then to Chinatown and North Beach, then SoMa and the Mission, and end up atop Twin Peaks before circling home. I was en route to the Haight when I saw this excellent heavy-duty offroad mobile home. (Click on any image to see it full-size.)
It wasn't quite 11 a.m. yet, but even though the Haight does like to sleep late, it was still surprisingly dead, with almost everything closed and/or boarded up. The old Haight Ashbury Music Center had already closed before the pandemic struck. I'd bought a tobacco sunburst Gibson ES-347 there in the mid-1980s, but sold it for gas money to get back to California after being stuck in Florida for a while. That beautiful instrument was way above my pay grade as a guitarist anyway, but it sure was sweet while it lasted.
Union Square sort of died to me when the Borders Books closed in 2011, even though it remained a good place to hang out and people-watch. Back in the day when there were people to watch, that is.
I pedaled through the Stockton Tunnel, which thankfully had a bike lane, and was surprised by all the shoppers in Chinatown, the busiest part of San Francisco I'd see all day.
North Beach was pretty sad, with its combination of interesting streets devoid of people, and all the boarded-up storefronts that were there even before the pandemic struck. SFMOMA was eerily quiet, with no lines, no queues of people chattering on the sidewalk.
Before the pandemic, my wife would walk over to Rainbow after work on Friday, do her shopping, then take a Lyft home, but the main attraction was the great selection of foods in bulk bins, so when the bulk bins were closed, that was it. Although we've been doing our shopping much closer to home ever since, it was still a busy place, with a line of cars waiting to park and two social-distanced lines of shoppers waiting to get in.
Heading through the Mission up toward Market Street, I wasn't quite hungry enough to stop at Pancho Villa Taqueria (and I didn't have a bike lock either), but I had to stop for this mural I'm going to call "The Goddess of 16th Street."
I could have stayed on Market until it turned into Portola, but I decided to take a commodius vicus of recirculation up among the Upper Market castles and environs along Corbett Street.
You gotta love being on an e-bike at climbs like this.
The last skate ramp you'll ever need?
"Selfie with Concrete Jungle"
This was not really a nature outing, certainly nothing like going up to Mt. Tam, but it sure was great, after a week of working from home, to get out of the house on a warm and sunny day, and for more than just a few minutes enjoy moving freely about the city.
City view on Saturday, May 16, 2020.
I could just pick out our Golden Gate Heights apartment from Twin Peaks, but when my wife texted me that she was waving, I couldn't tell she was joking.... If she'd gotten the binoculars we keep by the window she could have seen me waving back, but she was busy doing life drawing with an online group of artists--an innovation that could still be a good thing even when the pandemic is over.
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