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Published: February 27th 2008
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Posted by Onaxthiel:I very much enjoyed hanging out with my old AIT buddy B in southern Oregon the night previously, and his excellence as a host extended to the morning as well. We went out to a small local restaurant called the Bread Board for their breakfast special, and they loaded up the plates with food for a very reasonable price. Hopefully it won't be three more years until I see B again, be it on his home turf or on mine. We filled up on the heavy mineral laden water from the local river (known as the Lithia due to it's supposed healing effects on mental patients) and started our drive south towards San Francisco. The drive was book ended with drizzling rain at the start and end of the drive and snow in the mountains along the California/Oregon border. Really, the only clear portion of the drive was in the flat valley as we turned east towards SF.
Our reason to spend any time or money in this bastion of Hippies and Communists was an old friend of ours from middle school and high school who we would usually call M. Due to her wish to get a
nom de plum like we have and write a rebuttal, we have re-christened her as Xtvcl, henceforth referred to as X. It should be noted that X is one of the-shall we say-"eccentric" type personalities we have visited on our drive. When we were first in the Pacific Northwest back in September, we had hoped to come out and see her but ran out of time before getting back for our cousin's wedding. Due to our not visiting her, we had been guilt tripped on and off for the last five months about when we would eventually get out to see her. So between that and some of the San Francisco area's scenery, we had a pretty strong incentive to stop off in the bay area. We headed directly to X's house and did a brief exploration of the town. We started out in the Presidio, which was an Army post prior to being shut down in 1994. Directly under the Golden Gate bridge stands an old coastal defense fortification, which according to their sign is built to simulate one of the outer walls of Fort Sumter. I thought that it was a pretty fair approximation, except that it looked
far less rubbley than the ones I remember from visiting Charleston. Also on the old post we found the officer's club, which is now the visitor's center and the oldest standing building in the city of SF, and the post flag pole, which stands where the family of Gen. John Pershing was killed in a house fire while he was off campaigning in Mexico.
Next we headed to the old post cemetery and looked at a few of the grave sites that graced the beautiful hill overlooking the bay. We also played with X's head a bit, largely because it was so easy and also because she does such interesting things when she freaks out. This brought us to dinner time, and X took us to a very good Burmese restaurant where the waiter kept trying to bring us the food destined for the table next to ours. Once the sun set, we drove up the hill to Twin Peaks, where on a clear night you can see the entire town lit up below. Unfortunately, this was not a clear night, and there were only a few brief flashes of clear between the mist and fog rolling in from
The fort under the bridge.
Not nearly as rubbly as its' inspiration the bay. Those brief views were enough to tell us that on a better day, this would be an awesome place to come, but the weather channel told us that this weekend would provide no great opportunities. X told us that she never visits Twin Peaks when she doesn't have company, as David Lynch's series had managed to infiltrate her brain a bit too much for comfort. She also had managed to miss one of the most important things about the top of the hill; that it features a Space Toilet.
In SF, rather than paying for regular portapotties, the city has sprung for hugely expensive electronic public bathrooms. They look like a space capsule and feature pressure plate floors, are jet washed after every user, have audio instructions in three languages, and power doors that open to evict the occupant after 20 minutes to keep the homeless from taking up residence. Really, they are one of the most interesting parts of visiting this city. With our interest in seeing anything else for the night waning, we headed back to X's apartment and watched a few hours of her DVD collection before going to sleep in the wee hours
of the morning.
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