But the adventuring never stops! In fact, just this weekend, two girls and one car were back on the road, headed towards San Francisco.
The trip kicked off with my brilliant idea to take the 101 up to Ventura and have dinner on the sea before heading inland and up the 5. Now, some of you familiar with this route right now are asking yourselves what kind of moron I am. The best kind! We dined at a pub nowhere near the sea and then got stuck for an hour on a road towards the five which dumped us back at Magic Mountain, at which time if we were at all smart, we would have called it a day, gone home, and tried again on Friday.
But nay, we continued on our merry adventure, past the foul aroma of death, brussel sprouts, and meat as we encountered Slaughter Row, the infamous meat packing plants along the 5. Or as I like to refer to it, the Vegan Blackmail Highway. At 2, we got in to the city, exhausted, and headed over to the lower Haight, where my lovely friend Brian was kind enough to donate his wee bedroom to us for the weekend. Upon getting in, we realized the bed was actually on a loft about eight feet up, which meant I had to conquer my fear of ladders. Seriously, it's bad. Once I went hiking with my mom and encountered a ladder on our route back. I was about to turn around go back the entire way I came, when a three-year-old scooted past my shaking, sobbing form and darted down the ladder. So then I was shamed into climbing down. Anyway, in the loft bed we were terrified of rolling out, so we slept in the corner like baby animals in a cage.
The next day, we met up with my awesome friend Melissa and her mother at the Fisherman's Wharf. Now, I tend to avoid doing touristy things anywhere, and the Wharf certainly qualifies as a horrendous tourist attraction. First of all, Linda's iPhone directed us to a recycling plant instead of the restaurant. Then we paid for parking in the totally wrong spot. Finally, we found them and had a nice lunch that cryptically charged us for 'health tax' because we sat by a window. WTF, SF. Oh, and by the way...despite weather.com assuring me it was going to be a cool 69 degrees, it was actually about 100.
After lunch, we stopped to visit the piles of sea lions on barges off the pier. They were fighting and rolling around on each other and the area generally smelled like shit, but that wasn't stopping people from staring at them for hours. It stopped us, though. We quickly moved on after agreeing that it's stupid to not put more barges out for them. Note my disgust and eye-rolling contempt, San Francisco.
On the recommendation of Adam Bronstein, we stopped and visited the Musee Mecanique, which is the one thing worth wading through piles of tourists and horrible stores full of garbage only Michael Jackson could love. It's located on Pier 45 and features a huge collection of antique and modern slot games, pin ball machines, fortune tellers, and other automated devices. Very cool, totally free.
Afterwards, we met up with our friends Mia and Kellen for dinner at The Monk's Kettle, which is an excellent restaurant and definitely a can't-be-missed spot for beer drinkers. The menu boasts over 100 beers, with several on tap. Some of the beers are so rare they cost almost $70 a bottle. And the food was great, too, for a very reasonable price. My Jewish blood demands I note that.
We wandered around the Mission area hoping for a respite from the heat, and ended up in a bar where we were accosted by a giant man who aggressively wanted to do nice things for us. After that, Mia and Kellen called it a night but Linda and I continued, stopping at a bar near Brian's apartment to have one last drink and play a round of photo hunt. Oh, and did I mention the average cost for a drink was $4? Amazing.
Saturday, we waked alllll the way across the Haight (it remembers a lot better than it is, now that I'm not a gutter retard anymore) and across Golden Gate Park to see the Academy of Sciences Museum. See, the museum was built to be totally green, and it's incredibly cool. Once we got there, we wanted to go in but were put off by the steep entry fee ($25). Fortunately, the nicest people ever were there and talked us into buying a student pass ($20) and then getting an additional three dollars off for not using a car to get there. I guess our exhausted faces and stinky shoes were enough proof that we walked.
It was worth every penny. There's an extensive aquarium on the bottom floor, and a swamp with an albino alligator and snapping turtles, which are modern day dinosaurs. Every exhibit flowed organically into the next. The rainforest had butterflies flapping around and at one point a woman described a frog as a 'tree fart' without even realizing it. Plus, the roof is this super crazy grassy knoll with wild flowers growing on it. It's proof that you can have unique and beautiful architecture using environmentally friendly tactics, which has been one of the major thorns in green living. And anyone who knows me knows I'm not really a tree-hugging hippie. I think white people with dred locks should be rounded up and shorn.
Check this guy out.
Heyyyy
We took like ten pictures and this was the best one.
Butterfarts.
Finally, we met up with Brian and Aviva and had a delicious dinner on 19th and Valencia at an incredibly cheap Italian place that served ridiculous portions. At some point we went out with some other friends and tried to hit up a nineties dance party in a bar that charged me five dollars to basically shove me in a cattle car, which was terrible. After waiting in a bathroom line for forty minutes and downing three drinks as fast as possible, I was ready to call it a night, so we went back to the house, got drunker, and Brian and Aviva were subjected to my boring and strange rambling about World War I, which is odd since I in no way consider myself a WWI aficionado.
The next day, we drove around looking for a decent brunch place and ended up at Pork Shop in the Mission, which was surprisingly vegan-friendly for its name. Then we hit the road after I fought it out with my stupid tape deck about accepting the ipod converter.
As we drove back into L.A, we could see all the fires in the hills. Insane. I've never seen them so close. It was strangely beautiful and terrible. Reminded me of Mordor.
I'm going to try and update this more often, maybe write about more mundane non-travel related things.
