North Bay and Pacific sunset

11:55 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 4, 2010 – Scott’s house, Castro, San Francisco

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Though Scott had gotten my hopes up earlier about attending an Oakland Athletics baseball game today, he decided that our time would be better spent exploring North Bay, which I had yet to see. So Scott, Linsey, her cousin, cousin’s boyfriend and I all drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin, where we took a little hike into the Muir Woods. It led us to a place called the German Tourist Club, a neat little lodge with good German beer and tons of board games to keep us entertained. We sat out on the deck in the sun and played Yahtzee until closing at 5 p.m.













We hiked back but weren’t ready to drive across the bridge to SF, nor were we quite hungry enough for dinner. So Linsey took us to a place called Slide Ranch, complete with goats, chickens and sheep, and perched on the edge of the spectacular rocky coastline. We climbed down the steep path to the beach, navigating over boulders like I spent all of my childhood doing during summer vacations in Maine. We had a tip from a guy named Steve that there was “something cool to see down there.”

















And he was right, a 25-30 foot dead whale was washed up on the shore, and according to Steve it had been there for about a month. There was still a surprising amount of meat on it, and it reeked like crazy. We took tons of photos and Scott picked out one of the cleaner vertebrae as a souvenir, though was later told by the painfully polite Steve that he was not allowed to take it with him. Then we moved to a less offensive smelling perch and watched the sun go down. Pacific sunsets are always a treat, as I am rarely awake to catch the sunrise on the East Coast.

Now that we had worked up an appetite, we stopped at Joe’s Taco Shack and ate our fill and then some. As if I need to eat more Mexican food considering I’m moving there in two days. For our nightcap, Scott and Linsey finally took me down to the Haight-Ashbury district, to a place called Magnolia Brewery. Afterward I walked down to Ben & Jerry’s and snapped a few photos of the intersection signs, so I guess I've seen all there is to see of the infamous hippy crossroads.

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