1-20-09 Tuesday (Danger! Danger!)

Today was our last GoSanFrancisco excursion. We took Bart/Muni to the Mars Bar & restaurant that was closed on the first Sunday we went to it. We had the restaurant.com certificate and decided to get it in for lunch. We walked like 12 blocks to get to it. We enjoyed our very large lunch. If you remember, we have to spend $35 to use the $25 certificate. Burgers, beverages and onion rings for an appetizer made it to $33.92 or something like that. It didn't seem to be a problem.

Now get this, we went to the de Young Museum. I don't know why, but we did. This museum had several exhibits. We actually enjoyed the modern art section. Well, "enjoyed" is an interesting word to use. What word can describe tolerated most of it, liked a few things, loved even fewer things? I know there's a total modern art museum in town, but I'm not interested. Really, I've had enough "culture", thanks for sharing.

Before leaving the museum, we did go up in a tower that offered a 360 degree view from 8 stories above. The tower was a little unnerving. It was glass all over. The small balcony outside the glass had no railing. No, visitors couldn't go out there but it just added to the feeling of danger. At one point I noticed Jim holding on to a stairwell guard. Apparently it was freaking him out. Of course I was there to console him. Yeah, uh huh, no... instead I switched to video mode and captured some of it on video. Comforting of me, isn't it? Overall, the views were very nice!

A stroll through the San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum (what ever all that means) was really beautiful. There were trails all over the place. Signs in front of each tree, plant, bush was available to point out the names of the foliage. We didn't get to do it all; the de Young Museum had taken more time than we thought it would.

We had some other museums or other crap to go see but we were running low on time. Anytime we've need to take MUNI (bus system), Jim had a number he'd call, tell them where we are, where we want to go and then they give us directions. With it getting late, we decided we'd finish off the evening with a few drinks at the Eagle. Jim calls. Jim writes it down. We hop on the bus. 30 minutes later or more, we're not seeing the stop we need. We look at a map and discover we're on the other side of town. We decided to give up and just go home. Let's check with the bus driver. Where's the closest BART (train) station? How do we get to it? Other direction? No cares in the world, yeah hop off, wait for the bus to come. We get off the bus. Is the neighborhood safe? Jim notices the street we needed was 1 block from where we got on the bus. Why did the help number have us even get on this bus? Argh! We're not happy. I really don't like the bus drivers. Very anti-helpful. They suck.

That pretty much concludes our non-free sightseeing. There's some other stuff we may have done, or may have been recommended to do, but I think we've covered quite a bit. We'll try to get back into the Castro later this week. Maybe we'll hit up some bars/clubs.