Yesterday while I was touring Cyprus with a new friend who is my tour guide here I mentioned having gone to San Francisco recently. Surprisingly, she told me she had also lived there and we had fun remembering places we both knew.
I moved to San Francisco in 1974. I’ve never liked any place more. With a couple of brief exceptions, I had not been back there since I left in 1980. My “slow travel” journey for 2021-22 began there. AirBnB enabled me to find a good place to stay for a month at a reasonable cost.
More than anything else, discovering how little the city has changed in 40 years was a joy to me. I celebrated my birthday in my favorite restaurant. I had a beer in the same bar where my friends and I met after work on Fridays. In the first few days I took pictures of the places where my son and I had lived. I remembered street names and bus routes. It was fun to return to Golden Gate Park and North Beach and Chinatown and Haight-Ashbury. When I lived there I couldn’t really afford to shop in the fine department stores but I loved browsing in them. They are all gone now but the buildings they inhabited are still serving customers. One of the best days in the month I was there was discovering that the old City of Paris department store is now located inside Niemann-Marcus, with the glass dome intact. Every day was a good day!
Covid was continuing to keep people from going to their offices and other workplaces when I arrived on June 1st. The streets were empty then but by the end of the month there was more traffic. Cable cars weren’t running while I was there but the bus and trolley system was serving the public as it always has. I was tickled by how many street names and bus route numbers popped into my head!
Going to San Francisco was the best gift I could have given myself. I’m happy to share it with you in the few pictures posted below. If you want to see more, tell me in the comments section what you’d like to see. If I have a picture of it, I’ll post it or send it to you. If you ever lived in San Francisco, please write a note about your best memories in the space below.
Libbie
It hosts many retail shops and outdoor markets on weekends.
gathers crowds of players and picnickers on warm weekends.
After the picnic there’s great ice cream nearby.
This is one of the best, found in Noe Valley.
In My Suitcase: Little Known Places to Discover 