This was James and Paul’s first trip to San Francisco and they arrived by sailboat under the Golden Gate Bridge with family waving to them from shore. In keeping with the non-traditional entrance, we did not see the typical tourist sights. We didn’t visit Alcatraz, Coit Tower, or Paul McCartney’s photography exhibit at the de Young Museum. We did spend an hour using the public exercise equipment in the Panhandle.
After two weeks of sunny Bay Area Fall, some of us were ready to just stay put for the rest of the year. We loved it all, but mostly the warmth of the welcome we received.
So, here are our top ten non-tourist attractions in the Bay Area:
1. Lea the Dog
With apologies to the human relatives who made our arrival feel like a homecoming, Lea the dog was the highlight of our time in the Bay Area. Lea is a certified therapy dog and enthusiastic pool lifeguard, and we all felt better after being with her.
2. Waymo
Robot taxis you control with your phone! James was in heaven.
We found any excuse to ride in a Waymo, including searching for the oldest Geocache in San Francisco County under a big lemon tree in the Fort Mason Community Garden where a clutch of birdwatchers were discussing a hummingbird in hushed voices.
3. Youth Sailing at the Sausalito Yacht Club
Paul’s loud voice and gearhead tendencies have served him well over the years, and maybe never more so than at the Sausalito Yacht Club. After hauling us onto their dock in a gale, the youth sailing coaches heard Paul drooling over their fleet of Fevas and invited him to go out sailing. These kids are not afraid to capsize halfway to Angel Island and neither was Paul.
4. Cruising Club of America
Steve recently joined the Cruising Club of America and his first meeting was a lunch with the ‘San Francisco Station’ in Sausalito. There he received anchorage and mechanic recommendations, copious support for this questionable adventure we’ve embarked upon, and even met my personal safety-at-sea idol, Chuck Hawley.
5. Maya, Jay, Izzy and Talia
I remember when friend’s parents came to visit in college and took us out to dinner at the nice restaurant across the bridge in Vermont. In San Francisco, some of my oldest college friends, Jay and Maya, became the parents. Maya picked us up from the boat in Sausalito — cheerfully hopping into the dingy in her nice work clothes — and drove us to their house in Berkeley where we met their kids for the first time, ate cannolis, and climbed Indian Rock at sunset. Maya dug out 30-year-old photos, our kids laughed at how young we looked, and I felt — despite cold, hard evidence to the contrary — that no time had passed at all.
6. Keoni
Steve’s cousin, Keoni, a genuine good time, met us at Bolinas Beach with a surfboard and spent a morning pushing everyone onto waves. Paul, who had been preparing for this moment since October 2016, was PSYCHED.
7. Cousin Andrew and Soon-to-Be-Cousin Benie
My ridiculously interesting nephew, Andrew, is an engineer at Astranis and gave us an “office” tour that included a fancy espresso, a control room of people communicating with geostationary satellites in high orbit, a vacuum chamber the size of our boat, a giant block of titanium, a Pier 30 real estate history, and fun facts like: goods exported to Space receive refunds on tariffs paid on Earth.
Andrew and his fiancée, Benie, also joined us for a sail around the Bay and have been kind enough to organize a wedding in Berkeley so we have a reason to come back.
8. The Internet Archive Tour
Every Friday at 1pm, there is a free tour of the Internet Archive’s HQ in a former Christian Science church not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. The tour starts on the main floor with a summary of the non-profit’s work archiving websites and other digital material (including video games from your childhood that you might be invited to play in front of the whole tour group), proceeds upstairs to the former sanctuary where humming servers sing to an audience of sculptures modeled after the organization’s employees, and ends in the basement where one of those employees serves you ice cream. Worth a visit even if you barely understand the questions your 13-year-old is asking the tour guide!
9. Apple Park
Every September, James watches a live stream of the Apple Event and gives us a summary the newest iPhone features. This year, according to Apple Maps, we were only 52 miles away from Apple Park on the day of the Event, but — being mere mortals and not tech YouTubers — we were not invited. Also, it was the kids’ third day of online school. We rented a car and drove down to Cupertino that afternoon anyway. The closest we got to the ring building was an AR tour in the Apple Store just outside the company gates, but it was pretty fun to be part of the of the buzz there that day. Like all pilgrims, we bought some merch.
On the way back, we stopped at Stanford to visit LMN’s recently completed Computing and Data Science Building and to give the kids the first in a series of extemporaneous lectures on college campus design. Next up, UC Berkeley and LMN’s Undergraduate and Academic Building.
10. Berkeley Bowl
One of the best parts of traveling is visiting foreign grocery stores and Berkeley Bowl is the Notre Dame of produce. If our boat refrigerator were bigger than a carry-on bag, I would have bought the whole section of Washington apples.
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