TheEnabler and I needed to head out to California for my Aunt’s memorial service in May. We decided that if we were going to make the trip, that we would head out a few days early and visit some friends in San Francisco before heading down the coast to Los Angelos.
We arrived late Tuesday afternoon in San Francisco after smooth flights. Our only issue – with the mask mandates lifted, most people were not wearing masks. We collected our rental car and headed over to our friends’ apartment. We had a chill Tuesday evening with dinner at a Mexican place.
Wednesday we visited Alcatraz and Chinatown. The views from the island are amazing, but its story is obviously rather darker. It started as a military fort before becoming a military prison and then a federal prison. The tour of the cell block is interesting, but seems rather voyeuristic with a dark satisfaction in the misery inflicted on the inmates… It’s somewhere I’m glad I visited, but don’t need to do often. Its also hard to visit a place like that without thinking about the state of our current incarceration system, but of course the tourist attraction wouldn’t want to be “political”, so it felt a little superficial.
Chinatown was cool, though I was sad we’d eaten so well at lunch because I really didn’t want to eat any of the amazing food we passed. We did visit the oldest still running fortune cookie factory though and found some room for fresh baked fortune cookies. Sadly they weren’t doing the full tour.
We ended Wednesday with trips out to some of the parks around the Golden Gate Bridge. The weather was gorgeous and even too sunny (I know, unheard of in San Fran) so most of us got a bit burned.
Throughout the day I had my Peruvian spindle in my Peruvian hand woven spindle bag. I’m working on tightly spun and plied yarn for Andean style backstrap weaving projects. The bag is wonderfully lightweight, but the fabric has enough friction that it doesn’t slide all over the place. It sat nicely with my purse and didn’t get in the way.
