Saturday June 12: Golden Gate Bridge and the Presidio

Saturday was a hot and sweaty day! I will preface this post by saying I walked for 5 hours straight. Wooo!

I started off at the Palace of Fine Arts. I stumbled upon it by accident, and my first thought was What the hell is this doing in San Francisco? It turns out to be a fake Greco-Roman ruin in San Francisco built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Expedition. On the top you can see a relief depicting "Art Under Attack by Materialists, with Idealists Leaping to her Rescue." Teehee! Another part of the building has these huge figures of women who look like they are holding on for dear life. I thought maybe Art was clinging on, determined not to fall into the abysmal pit of materialism.





My trusty tourbook mentioned the Wave Organ which was relatively close to the Palace of Fine Arts, so I decided to head over there. I couldn't really tell what exactly a wave organ is from the description from the tourbook. I thought it was going to be pipes set up that played different notes when the wind blew over them. Instead, they were these neato pipes that funneled the sound of the waves to the listener's ear. They are set up somehow so each one makes a different ocean noise. Some of them sounded like waves washing up on shore, while others sounded more like stomach gurgling. It was hard to find because it was very far away and you have to walk through a parking lot to get there, so it felt like a secret that I was in on.



Next stop was the Golden Gate Bridge. I've found that I don't have enough time on the weekdays to see all the things I want to see, so I have to pack things in on the weekend. I made a strict list of things I had to do, and one of those was walk the length of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was an unusually hot day for San Francisco, and as I walked towards the bridge I asked a random guy how I could get on the bridge because it wasn't readily apparent. He told me the way, and warned me it was more than a mile to the bridge, and a mile and a half to walk the bridge one way. "Oh, that's not bad!" I said, and marched on.

After a hot walk in which I shielded myself from the sun by holding up my warm fall coat over my head, I made it to the foot of the bridge! I was pretty sweaty at this point, but excited and determined to walk the whole bridge.

The bridge was very high up so the view was nice, and I definitely enjoyed the view and watching all the funny tourists. There was one couple I noticed where the woman was very overweight with large, jiggly love-handles, and her partner was resting his hand on one of them when he put his arm around her. I wondered if she ever felt self-conscious of him feeling her fat jiggle every time she walked.

The foot of the bridge used to have an old army fort, and the old buildings and remnants are still there. One thing I thought was hilarious was the pet cemetery! The military personnel's pets are buried there under handmade signs, mostly from about 1950 - 1970. I liked the names they chose. There was a pet named" Snafu." Someone else named their pet "John," which I think is a little weird, since so many people are named John. Here is one owner who has impeccable taste in names.


The pet cemetery was at the start of the Presidio, a huge park in San Francisco where people can go hiking. It's really nice that San Francisco has this park, because I feel like they could make a lot of money by developing the land. Inside the park were all these art pieces inspired by nature. One was huge letters that spelled out phrases like, "Resolve conflict with song." The park was gorgeous, but I got lost in it for many many hours! It was probably a good thing I got lost, because I got to see a lot of the park that way. At one point I stumbled across the military cemetery and just laid down next to the gravestones because I was so exhausted! It was peaceful, laying down among all the white gravestones. The hill was so steep that I was at a 45 degree angle, which was interesting as well.


I was lost for so long and took so many wrong turns, that I ended up at the Pacific Ocean!