Days Nine & Ten: San Francisco, Baby!

Having spent the night in Silicon Valley with Joe’s cousin and her active family, we motored north to San Francisco on Thursday morning. We parked off The Embarcadero on Broadway, found a Blue Bottle Coffee stand in a farmer’s market near the Ferry Terminal Plaza, and ate cream-filled donuts for breakfast; I had the maple-bacon cream filling – yum! From there we walked into the Financial District to meet Joe’s colleagues in the Wells Fargo San Francisco Office. They recommended that we take the streetcar to Fisherman’s Wharf (which we did) where we ate clam chowder out of a sour dough bread bowl and tossed a few quarters into the coin-operated arcade games at Musée Mecanique.


On the way to visiting my cousin’s family in Petaluma, about 45 minutes north of San Francisco, we drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and stopped to take a few pictures. Afterwards, we worked our way southeast to Walnut Creek to stay with Joe’s friends for our last two nights in California. In addition to catching up with family and friends, Joe and I were curious to see how folks lived in the Bay Area. Everyone we know here is a transplant from another part of the country or world – South Dakota, Minnesota, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Southern California and Denmark. We’ve been wondering how long their commutes are, what forms of transportation they use, can they afford to buy a house or do they stick to renting, is the weather and lifestyle worth the cost of housing, does any affordable housing exist close to the city, how do they like Californians, what’s the job market like, what do they do for fun, etc.


Basically, everything seems absolutely ideal except for the cost of housing. What would sell for $200,000 in a nice neighborhood in Minneapolis could easily cost $1,000,000 in San Francisco. And though the salaries and wages are higher in California, they don’t make up for the cost of housing. So then Joe and I were left scratching our heads and trying to figure out whether or not the lower cost of housing in the Twin Cities is truly worth the four brutal winter months (not including roughly 1-2 additional months of moderately temperate winter) we suffer each year. It’s a tricky calculus, especially when we started adding fresh produce, wine, redwood forests and an ocean into the equation.

On Friday morning, we set these thoughts aside and took the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) into Berkeley and later into San Francisco on what turned out to be a 10 mile walk through the University of California Berkeley campus and then the Tenderloin, Civic Center, Hayes Valley, The Castro, Upper Haight, Golden Gate Park, Pacific Heights, Chinatown and Union Square neighborhoods of San Francisco. We saw distinct subcultures coexisting, including academics, activists, suits, techies, Latinos, Asian Americans, LGBTQ, trainhoppers, hobos & tramps, tourists, hockers, homeless, bohemians, artists, foodies, runners, cyclists, bikers and almost everything in between. It was a fairly comprehensive day.

So, as always, we felt exhausted as we took the BART back to Walnut Creek around 9:30pm. It was our last day exploring California.