A walk to work

The weather has been beautiful here in SF ever since we got back to town last Wednesday (actually, I hear it was beautiful ever since we left!). This morning it was such a pleasure to be walking outside, that instead of turning from 18th St onto Mission, in order to catch the shuttle at 16th & Mission, I made an impulsive decision to walk all the way to work. It's only the 2nd time I've done that in a year and a half, the other time being sometime last summer or fall. I did walk home a handful of times last year, but I've yet to do that this year. (It was on one of those walks home last fall that I randomly found Mario playing tennis on the Dolores Park courts, just days after he'd arrived in town!)

It was a pleasant but somewhat sweat-inducing walk. (Thanks to the pedometer that Anj now regrets getting for me, I now know how long the walk is too: approx 5500 steps, or about 2.25 miles.) The walk across 18th Street, from Mission to the Castro, was nice. It was good to get out of the usual rectangle defined by our place and 16th & Mission that I typically walk every day. As I walked by Tartine, Delfina, DPC, and the park, it occurred to me how rarely I get over even that far. Also got to see the signs of 18th streets continued gentrification, and reminded me of this SFBG BizNews column about that topic, which I had planned to do a post about. I may still do a longer post on that--in particular, about how I keep thinking that the move of Fabuloid to a Mission
storefront seems like a significant one for the neighborhood: the first upscale boutique on Mission itself.

I kept going, past the glorious park (one couple playing tennis), through the Castro, up Upper Market and up into the the hills (what some call the "Swish Alps" apparently, as I read in last year's SFBG's Best of the Bay, where it
lost out to the Tandoorloin in the category of "Best New Neighborhood Name"). The views from up there--back across the Mission to the bay and across to the East Bay--are wonderful. (If you don't want to hike the hills up there, take the 33 Stanyan from the Mission to the Haight, or vice versa, since its route snakes through there. And you can even check when the next one is coming on nextmuni.com.)

One of these days I'll have to follow through on my plan to walk from our place to the top of Twin Peaks...it's not all that much higher. But I crested where Corbett intersects with Twin Peaks Boulevard, and then descended down in Cole Valley. This part of the hike I wasn't so excited about, I suppose since I walked nearly every variation of it when we were living on Saturn our first couple months in the city, and I was commuting to work on foot.

I'd loaded up the Shuffle with some fresh tracks in the morning, including all the BE tracks, which I'd just ripped. And as I headed up Parnassus, I had one of those iPod moments, where the shuffle algorithm's computation aligns with your time, place, and being: the BE intro kicked in just as I arrived at the edge of campus.

The weather being so nice facilitated a nice SF sort of weekend. Friday afternoon on Pier 23, followed by dinner in North Beach; Saturday on the beach in Marin, followed by La Taqueria takeout for dinner; drinks Sunday afternoon at the recently renovated Cliff House. It's been occurring to me how SF isn't oriented towards the ocean--the only times I see it
are when I climb up to the top floor of our building and take in the view. So this past weekend was a nice exception to that.

Postscript: Last fall, when I was regularly biking across the city and into Golden Gate Park on Sundays for our soccer games, I thought of doing a photographic essay of the ride. Should still do that (even though I haven't made the ride since early Dec; in fact, the last time was when I got caught in the Muni tracks at Church & Duboce and wiped out!), and also do something like that for this walk to and/or from work. I'd been thinking about how I should start carrying the camera with me.