It's been a fun 72 hours in San Francisco thus far. This is the first time I've ever been here, and like most people who have visited, I find this town to be great. I'm certainly not illuminating much to most people reading this, but it's fairly arresting how different, (insert any number of adjectives here: liberal, relaxed, stoned, etc.), this area is compared to the places I've lived. Most markedly, the general puritanical aspects of New England were glaring as soon as I walked around here for five minutes. That's not to say that the East Coast, or the Midwest are somehow deficient, but the the moral code of conduct is far less rigid here. Then again, this is nothing new or insightful to most people reading this. I should best leave it at saying that I have finally experienced this new perspective.

I've been pretty busy dealing with a lot of loose ends around here since landed here on Wednesday night. UPS smashed up my bike badly enough to destroy my rear dérailleur and bend the hanger to where I couldn't mount the rear wheel into the dropouts. I took it to a good shop and they fixed the problem, but had to torch the hanger to bend it back into place. I'm going to file a claim with UPS for the cost of the parts and repairs, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

The reassembly of the bike beyond that was relatively painless.

I saw my old friend from Nebraska, Sam, on Friday night and all day Saturday. Sam plays drums in a number of (mostly jazz) bands around here, and he was playing a gig at a small gallery space. PeterB and I went with and drank a lot of beer while a bunch of people packed into an adjacent gallery to look at some terrible diorama "art". While we were at this art event I got a call from Rebekah, a friend from my college days in Vermont, and who I hadn't seen since graduating six years ago. She happened to be right down the street, and came over. I wound up drinking tea and shooting the shit with her at her place for a while, which was great. She's one of the people in my life that lives life mush ore differently than most everyone else I know, and it makes for a refreshing perspective.

I woke up at PeterB's this morning with Sam sleeping on the floor. He was bummed and grumbled all day about how he had "blown it" with some girl the night before. I called the Whaaaambulance for him....

I went to a farmer's market with Rebekah and a friend of her's, and loaded up on food stuffs for the ride. It was a fairly substantial walk, over some steep hill I can't remember the name of. She showed me a few cool places, including the house she was born in, which kind of put the zap on me because I've only seen the house I was born in once, and that was for about 30 seconds.


I've been eating a lot of good food here, which is not hard to say because the food in Minneapolis and Vermont is generally terrible. I'm been eating a ton of Mexican food, and some Asian food thrown in, including a Vietnamese place we went to for lunch today. It was good. Really good.

Carnival in Mission is tomorrow and the parade goes right in front of PeterB's place. I was hoping to start the ride in the morning, but given the chaos that's sure to be abound, we've decided to compromise. We're going to head out over the Golden Gate Bridge in the afternoon and set up camp fairly close to the city in order to make a good test run of the gear and then set out in earnest on Monday morning. We're pretty much completely packed and ready to go. I'm itching to get out on the road and start putting on some serious miles....