San Francisco, Day 2

On our second day, we started by walking down the street to a local cafe where I had an omelet which was cooked in a waffle maker. Seemed to work just fine, so no complaints here.

One of the primary goals for the day was to go miniature golfing. That’s what the Daughter wanted to do, so she was going to miniature golf!

On Google Maps, I found a place up in Marin County, so we headed out over the Golden Gate Bridge. We stopped at the vista point on the other side of the bridge to take some pictures and look around. Very nice and a beautiful day for pictures and sight seeing.

We found the golf place without incident and golfed our 18 holes and had a good time. It was a pretty area and a fun drive.

On the way back we decided to look for something to drink and followed signs randomly (this is “Adventure Time”). We ended up finding the Marin County Farmer’s Market. Lots of good food to choose from, arts, crafts, fruits, vegetables. Your basic Farmer’s Market, albeit a bit more upscale and expensive for the arts and/or crafts.

We opted for heading back to the hotel to crash for a while and get some downtime.

The plan for the evening was something I heard about only recently: Bring Your Own Big Wheel. This is the eight running of the event. Previous years had run anything with wheels down Lombard “The crookedest street in America”. You can find video on the web. Apparently, though, the organizers were not able to get permission to run on Lombard, so they moved to Vermont Street “Even crookeder than Lombard”, or so claim the organizers.

We made our way to the site of the event and found hundreds of people already there, lining the sides of the street, the nearby park and pretty much in the course itself. Not to mention the probably 100 participants. They were dressed in all manner of costumes from bunny suites to Mr. T to a guy in bubble wrap. They were riding pretty much anything with plastic (not rubber!) wheels. Including a wheeled garbage can!

We managed to get a meager view from the park along the side of the run and missed the first run, though I managed to take some pics by raising my camera above the crowds. Then, after the first run, the people in front of us moved and we managed to get a better view for subsequent runs.

I have no idea how much “organization” there was to this thing. Lots of people went down the course. Then lots of people watching wandered on to the course while participants carried their vehicles back up to the top (or what was left of them – the running of the course appeared to be hard on the toys, er, racing equipment. Then the course would empty out for at some unseen signal and then people would again come flying down the track.

There were some very impressive crashes, both between participants and with the audience. I saw one guy go flying in to the audience, then come bouncing to his feet, clearly apologetic while helping the bowled over audience members to their feet and helping them collect their tipped beverages, then hopped back on his vehicle and took off again.

We watched this for a half hour or forty five minutes until we decided it was unlikely to get more interesting and decided to call an end to that event.

We drove back to our hotel and then walked a bit later down to Pier 39 again where I had the required (for the trip) bowl of chowder in a sourdough bowl. Yum.