San Fran Plan

After a trip through the Sierra Nevada on I-80, we got to our hotel just north of the San Francisco airport. I hopped a BART train to meet up with Joey at his place after he got off work. The BART gets a bad rap, but it's actually a pretty nice system, especially compared with places like Philly or Chicago.



It was a really nice day, but I got to see some of the famous fog rolling in.



I got off the BART at one of the Mission Street stops and got to experience some of the flavor of the city on my walk into town. The districts in the city are all tiny and dense, and the ethnic makeup of the city can change from block to block.



I got to Joey's place a bit early, so I walked up Bernal Heights, which is only a couple blocks from his place. Great views from the top, and the fog rolling over the top of the hills was fascinating.





We hung around at Joey's apartment for a bit before heading into downtown. He found himself a nice, cosy place in a good location.



Downtown we ended up at a bar celebrating Oktoberfest, so we went along with it and bought boots of beer.



This morning, we woke up to a clear sky and decided it would be a great time to check out the Golden Gate Bridge. Joey had only driven across it in the past, so we decided to walk it instead. As we drove up, we saw the beginnings of fog coming into the bay.



The bridge is definitely quite the structure, and experiencing it with partial fog cover was actually really neat.









After the bridge and drive through town, we decided to play some tennis. We found courts near his place and played for about 2 hours (3 sets). It's definitely a game that you have to play regularly to maintain. I hadn't played in almost a year, and I realized I was trying too hard to play at the level I was at last summer when I couldn't control my serve or backhand and dropped the first two sets pretty quickly. The third set was much more evenly matched after I brought the serve under a little more control and started worrying about getting the ball back across the net rather than going for kill shots. I still lost the set, but I broke Joey a couple times and had several games go to deuce 3,4,5...

Anyway, playing just makes me want to get back to playing more regularly.

Then we went back to his pad to watch the Ducks game (a blowout for the Ducks!) and I watched the pilot episode of Man Men, which Joey is raving about. Joey's TV doubles as a computer (or it may be the other way around), but as I sit here typing this post I'm having to move my head left to right just to take in the enormity of the screen.



Our most recent entertainment came when Joey swatted a fly on the carpet, and then had Thomas eat it. Thomas is Joey's robot vacuum. There was just something mildly hysterical about Thomas cheerily beeping to life and immediately sucking up the fly.

Tonight we're going out again... somewhere or another. Then the big event tomorrow is Sloshball, a game of kickball involving alcoholic cider at second base.