An Anniversary Trip – Great for Everyone!

Continued from:  An Anniversary Trip – Just Getting Started

One of my favorite images of San Francisco is the Golden Gate Bridge.  In 2004, not long after our daughter had started graduate school at UC Berkeley, my wife and I were once again in San Francisco for me to teach my professional level course.  On Sunday before I began teaching, our daughter took us over to the Pacific Ocean near the Cliff House.

She then said she wanted us to take a short hike to see something cool and I recalled walking along a wooded path with the ocean crashing against the rocks on a steep drop-off to our left.

As I rounded one bend, I caught sight of the top of one of the Golden Gate Bridge towers.  I then realized that was what she wanted me to see—my daughter knew I loved to see and photograph this bridge, and she knew I had never seen it from this Pacific Ocean viewpoint.  This is one of the photos I took that day.

In the over twenty years since that day, my memory had faded as to where this view was, but I somehow thought it was from a trail in Golden Gate Park.  After driving and driving and driving through the park, I never could find where that trail started.  Resigned to myself that it was just not meant to be, I drove out of the park but then realizing I was near the Cliff House, decided to drive up there.

After passing the Cliff House, I was about to start my long drive back to my son’s house, when I came across Lands End Park.  I wondered, could this be where that trail started?  I decided to give it one last try and so pulled in to park my car.

As I made my way along that gravel path, I though this somehow seemed familiar.  Slowly, I began to feel more optimistic that this was the right way.  Then just when I was about to walk out from beneath the shade of those wind-swept trees, I spotted the very top of my quarry.

At this point in the day, sadly my phone battery was almost dead and without the means to recharge it, I had a choice of A) either taking multiple photos of the bridge trying to recreate solely from memory what perspective that 20-year old photo had been taken, or B) searching endlessly through the photos on my phone to try to find it likely depleting my battery in the process and resulting in no new photos.  I chose the former and so hurried along the path and at multiple locations, snapped a photo to try to recreate from memory that twenty-something-year-old snapshot as seen below.

It wasn’t until the next day after I had dropped off the grandkids at school, that I was able to locate that old photo  and compare it to my newest photos.  Even though I did not have that old photo available when I was on the trail, I remembered there being some tree branches in the foreground almost framing the bridge and tried to see the bridge with that perspective.  Either I did not go far enough along the path to reach the same vantage point, or in the ensuing decades, forest fires had possibly claimed those trees.

So, although not reproducing the same photo, exactly I was pleased with the ones I took and satisfied with the success of my outing.

I successfully made it through the rest of the week with our two grandkids each having some afterschool or evening activity.

Our son and daughter-in-law landed at SFO Friday morning after a nine-hour direct flight from Tokyo having lost 14 hours in time zone changes over the trip.  They were somewhat worn-out to say the least.  My son thanked me profusely for coming and allowing them to take this anniversary trip.  And my daughter-in-law’s mom thanked me as well for coming and spending the time there.

In addition to my fun day on Wednesday, during my stay, I also got to enjoy some of the good things I love about San Fransico like Boudin Sourdough Bread…

… and a huge Mission-style burrito.

But a unique new experience was seeing so many Waymo autonomous white Jaguars literally driving everywhere driverless (I guess saying autonomous driverless cars is akin to saying an unmanned drone).

It was so odd to pull up next to one and look over to see no humans in the front seats—or to have one pass you.  Interestingly the day I got home, I got a news alert that Waymo cars in Austin, TX had driven onto flooded streets and then stalled.  I don’t think I am quite ready to take one for a ride.

Overall, the eight days I was gone was the longest I had been away from home in several years and I was glad to get back home on Saturday evening.  But it was a huge success for everyone!  While they were gone, our son and daughter-in-law shared almost 450 photos and videos showing they were having a wonderful time in Japan.

And it’s a trip my son wants to take again one day, maybe for their 20^th wedding anniversary.