Welcome to California
Sod the title. Greetings from Oregon, from where I write having spent five of the most interesting days of my life in San Francisco...
Ed and I were met at SFO by Diggy, an old friend of ours from West Virginia who we knew six or seven years back in London. We'd helped him out when he was dumped by a girl and left stranded in the UK, and had become fast friends - this, I got the impression, was to be payback. Diggy's car had died, so he'd taken the bus from Oregon - a longer journey than our eleven hours from Heathrow. We picked up a crappy Chevvy HHD rental - a "mid-size" - and headed into town. We met an old friend of his for lunch - CJ, a wrinkled, leathery old hippy with a solid career in pot farming, a sideline in independent movies, and a giant pair of sunglasses that hid his wild eyes from the low San Francisco sunshine. After a cruise around the city we checked into a motel on Van Ness and Broadway and headed for the Golden Gate Bridge. I drove across, wide-eyed, taking in the bay, and felt like we'd finally made it to San Francisco. Over in Marin County, we drove up to an abandoned gun battery site and watched our first Pacific sunset overlooking the city.
We ended the night in Shanghai Kelly's, a famous old Irish bar on Polk that would later form basecamp for Diggy's Bay to Breakers (B2B) crew.
After a 34 hour day, Ed and I slept well but woke early. I went for a run (running every day I'm out here is the goal - have you seen what these guys eat?) while Ed pulled together some shopping and Diggy slept off the night before. A spot of shopping and a cruise around town was enough to persuade us that we needed some serious rest before the approaching madness of B2B weekend, so we headed out of town to a motel in Pacifica, a quiet settlement 20 miles south of SF on route 101.
A couple of days kicking around the beach catching up on sleep (and taking some more runs) meant that the evenings and San Francisco were ours for fun. Diggy introduced us to one of his old army buddies, a special forces medic just back from his fifth tour in Iraq/Afghanistan. Mac - a muscular, primal, good-looking Bostonian - seemed a good guy, but also a bit damaged from war (he'd just lost his cousin to an IED in Afghanistan) and was finding it hard to adjust to civilian life. His wife and her friends seemed a world away from his experiences - they worked in financial services and at Google - but nonetheless, we were all in it together for the B2B weekend. I tried to meet up with my friend Lindsay, whom Joe, Sam and I had met on a wild night out in London with her friend Amy a year or so ago. Sadly, we both had extremely drunken friends to deal with (Ed, of all people, had gotten out of the car to be sick, then decided he didn't want to get back in before running off into the night...) so we didn't make our rendezvous.
Next day we did, though. It was Saturday, the day before B2B, and we were heading into to town to check in at the W, one of the best hotels in town, which would act as our base for the weekend. Diggy was paying - his elder brother Tom was joining us, and I think Diggy wanted to show off how well his construction business has been going.
A little about B2B; it's primarily a race, from the bay side of town (downtown Embarquadero) to the wind-lashed wilderness of Ocean Beach - hence Bay to Breakers. The runners, though, are only a tiny part of it. The majority of the 100,000 are very much in it for the craziness that San Francisco is famed for - as this video shows (note the salmon at 2'40'', a group that run the race "upstream" every year. This year they were accosted half way by a group of bears that picked them off around mile three...). Diggy and his friends from Shanghai Kelly's - Mac and his hard-drinking fellow Irish - do the race in kilts every year. I'd picked up a few on the internet so that Diggy, Tom, Ed and I could join in.
First, though, was Saturday's Oyster and Beer festival down on the Marina. The guys were already in their kilts so I joined them, but - teetotal for this trip - I swiftly fell out of place with all the drinking. Ed was sleeping off the night before back at the hotel. Thankfully, the music and the oysters were excellent, and Lindsay was on her way in to join me. I took part in a little violent dancing (something between rugby and dodgems) to the Dropkick Murphys before giving the guys the slip and driving Lindsay out for dinner in her home town of Mill Valley, a perfect little slice of wealthy, liberal California nuzzling onto the North side of the Bay. It was only on the way into the (excellent) Chinese restaurant that I remembered I was still in my kilt, but no matter - I was with a local girl, and in any case, it's all about how you carry it off. She made sure we went into her town square for coffee later, looking, I expect, for a touch of notoriety - how many girls bring a kilted Brit into town on your average Saturday evening in Mill Valley? - so everyone had something to gossip about.
Sunday was B2B - we four kilted up and stepped out of the W onto the route. The young, creative and beautiful of San Francisco were on their very best form - such energy, such colour, such abandonment - and I felt myself really falling for the city. It started at 8am; by 11, everyone was wasted, and by noon there were casualties on every street corner. One of the guys had dropped too much acid on top of too much booze and had freaked out. Diggy had to take him back to the hotel and chill him out. All the while Ed and I were up ahead, missed the ruckus, and so took in the rest of the 12km walk ourselves. And there was much to see - a sound system or a band on every block, hundred of floats and shopping trolleys pushed walkers, kegs and PAs up and down the city's startling hills, while naked people, cheerleaders, aliens, pirates, Elivii and countless others boogied on towards the beach in a riot of colour and flesh. When it came, the beach was amazing; the biggest waves I'd ever seen crashing over the beautiful walkers - only the fittest had made it all the way.
We picked our way through the debris back towards town looking for an after-party. In the scrum to remove his friend from the race, Diggy had left his bag in their beer trolley - which was later abandoned to the streets along with his phone, his house keys, his cash and his stash; when we returned we found him pacing around the room, distinctly unhappy. We showered and declared a mission - to track down the rest of the group (who were passed out in hotels all over the city), and find what we could of his stuff. Four hours, three cars, two hotels, five walkers, two bars, six homeless people, two cops, two cleanup crews and three sincere arguments with a satnav later and we'd recovered both his phone and, amazingly, his smokes. It meant we'd missed the afterparty with Lindsay and her "dozen single friends who are just dying to meet you guys", but victory was nonetheless sweet, and we meant we'd seen the city in a way in which we never otherwise would.
Yesterday we checked out early and drove North, first swapping rental cars, then taking a walk around Muir Woods, a redwood forest bequeathed to the nation by a guy called Kent in the early 1900s. Before long we were on our way out of California into Oregon, to Diggy's place in the woods, a giant wooden house with a glass side that looks out onto the Mackenzie River which flows only ten paces from his back door. We're off fishing this afternoon, then off for a night out in Portland before getting set for the long drive to the Gorge at George and the Sasquatch Music Festival at the weekend.
