California Hwy 1: Santa Cruz

This morning, we pick up a rental PT Cruiser from downtown San Francisco and point it south toward Highway 1, beginning our drive down the coast to Los Angeles. The view is indescribable. I can’t capture its beauty on camera, nor do words do justice to it either. Only hackneyed phrases come to mind: “rugged coastline”, “craggy black rocks”. Ocean waves beat against the rocks; the spray creates a liquid fan. The California coastline must be experienced.

Just sixty miles down the coast, is crunchy Santa Cruz, on the northern edge of Monterey Bay. Santa Cruz, a hip haven with a well-scrubbed downtown, invites us in for lunch. The shopping village exudes sanitized bohemian quaintness.

The prices in the local parking garage are quaint too. At first, the sign “No $20 Bills” seems odd, but when our parking tab is $1.50, we understand.

We have lunch alfresco at Chocolate. After salmon sandwiches, Gene and I split a slice of Chocolate Ecstasy Cake and if you consider thick fudgy chocolate ecstasy, then this cake makes the grade.

We return to Highway 1, passing strawberry farms, lettuce fields and bent-back workers. We pass a paintball headquarters and a rickety military supply shop.

In Monterey County, we encounter dust clouds from tractors. Moss Landing State Beach looks a little swampy. We are surprised to see a monstrous power plant looming ahead of us across from the Moss Landing Marina. It reminds me of the monstrosities in New Jersey. I find it comical that a section of the highway is sponsored by Stardock Document Shredders.

San Francisco: Mexican Food

We want Mexican food tonight. Friends from California say that California has the best Mexican food. They go as far as saying New York has no decent Mexican food at all, at the low end. They will concede that California can’t do pizza like New York.

Our hotel concierge enthusiastically recommends Maya on 2^nd and Folsom. Set back from the street in an office building plaza, I think the bar and restaurant is probably hopping during the week. But it is quiet on this Sunday night, with only four or five tables seated in the large main room. Only one person works the front of the house.

I order a pomegranate Margarita on the rocks. Our guacamole and chips arrive in a two-tier silver serving tray. Gene and I each have a lobster taco appetizer—it sounds too good to share. I order a half-portion shrimp enchilada as a main course. I wish more restaurants offered small and large portions so I can try more dishes (without sharing).

Gene and I want to stop in a bar for a nightcap after the taxi drops us back in our Financial District/North Beach neighborhood. Last night, we could only find bars, no open restaurants. Tonight, we can only find restaurants and no bars. Not exactly no bars, we poke our heads into several. The classic Vesuvio Café has no bar to speak of—only tables. We feel like chatting with locals or the bartender. Each bar we look in has either too many people or too few. Coppola’s place locks their doors by 9:30 pm. The problem must be us; we are not in the right mood.

We walk back to the hotel to have our nightcap there. Hotel bars are always perfect—always seats available, but never deserted. And San Francisco Hilton bar carries Absolut Ruby Red.

We will pick up our rental car early tomorrow to start down Highway 1. Thirty-six hours in San Francisco is not enough.

San Francisco: Taxicabs and Poetry

We try to hail a cab on Stanyan Street on the edge of Golden Gate Park. Fifteen minutes later, we wonder who told us San Francisco is cab-hailing city--either our hotel concierge or the cab driver who dropped us off. Not today, it isn't.

A taxi finally pulls up; a sweaty man in sloppy business attire jumps in front of us and steals the cab. The guy can’t pretend he didn’t see us. He says, “I’ll give you $20. I really have to get somewhere.” Now he’s halfway inside the cab as he says this so his offer is no offer at all, only a way to ease his conscience. We decline: we’re tired and his conscience doesn’t deserve easing.

I bet he’s from New York.

We pop into the cozy, Victorian Stanyan Park Hotel across the street and ask the girl at the front desk to call a cab for us. She obliges us cheerfully. The girl chatters to the other couple in the lobby about a local oil store. She recommends using blood-orange oil to make brownies. Note to self. The Stanyan Park Hotel, listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, is worth considering for our next San Francisco trip.

Before dinner, we walk to City Lights Bookstore, the landmark bookstore co-founded by beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Independent book stores are rare and City Lights is probably the best known of them all. City Lights carries two copies of our friend Daniel Nester’s poetry book, God Save My Queen, Part II. Perhaps they sold out of Part I?

I buy both parts of Gore Vidal’s memoir. Gene buys a Noel Coward memoir.

San Francisco: Hanging in The Haight

I leave Gene at Amoeba Records. Gene disappears in the vortex of one of America’s greatest record stores. Some might argue the Amoeba in Los Angeles is better, but we won’t be there for a few days yet.

I stroll down Haight Street, knowing I have plenty of time to wander while Gene record shops.

The iconic street seems less commercial than it did ten years ago when I walked these blocks the first time. (Does any place ever become less commercial?) But I see more small businesses and fewer franchises.

Ben and Jerry’s is still on the legendary intersection of Haight and Ashbury. An American Apparel shop is down the street. Of all the chain stores that might have wedged in, these two have a bit of hippie spirit—albeit in a less-than-authentic 21^st century way.

Haight Street is dotted with coffee shops, vintage clothing and boutique dress shops. I pass the fabled Café Cha Cha Cha; I see Cheap Thrills, the clothing-slash-head shop I browsed through last time.

The mannequin-to-beat-all-mannequins, the giant legs with fishnet stockings and red high heels still stick out a second-floor window. I stop in a couple boutiques and try on some well-priced skirts and tees.

Haight Street Haunters and Revelers

I see fewer old hippies haunting the street than more kids digging the scene, as they might say in retro-speak. Haight Street draws its panhandlers; most are young and sincere. Yet I ignore them or mumble a barely audible “sorry” as I do in New York.

One guy shouts “smile” to me as I pass; he is not offended that I give him no change. He seems genuine and now I feel bad. Trying to avoid bad karma, I give money to the next guy I see—a young guy with a dog. Nodding out he is not asking for money; but he needs it. I ask after his dog. He is pleased and I feel a little better.

A place-in-time can never be replicated and 1967 was the Summer of Love. Whether the kids hanging out are bad imitations, it beats a museum.

I meet Gene, happy with his haul from Amoeba.

San Francisco: Up Telegraph Hill

A small art show is going on at an equally small park, Washington Square. We can see a row of easels from our café seats across the street. After finishing our “Bennies from Heaven,” Café Divine’s variation on the classic Eggs Benedict, we walk through the park, stop and get silly over an adorable terrier who I swear, wants to come home with us. Young families stretched out on blankets fill the park on this first beautiful day of the season.
Gene and I walk toward Telegraph Hill, mostly hoping to see the parrots we read about in The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. The incline of the streets grow steeper and the Stairmaster jokes are losing their punch. We sit down to rest on a curb. How can anyone live so high on a hill? Cars are parked at a ninety-degree angle and street signs warn to prevent runaway cars.
We trudge slowly to the base of Coit Tower and search the trees for parrots. We see no birds, but we get the classic panoramic view of San Francisco Bay and the island of Alcatraz.

San Francisco: Zigzag Through Chinatown

After I step out of the shower, I hunt for my makeup bag. I dig through our suitcases several times. Wary of how this affects the feminine psyche, Gene helps me dig. It is nowhere. I am certain I didn’t leave it behind.

In sunglasses and shorts, I ask the front-desk clerk directions to the nearest drugstore.

She tells us to walk up Stockton—the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown—to Broadway. At least Stockton is not as impassable as New York’s Canal Street I say, but within a block or two, the street clogs with shoppers. We weave around parked cars to avoid the masses.

At Walgreen’s, we buy makeup and pick up a couple of other forgotten items. Aren’t there always forgotten items, no matter how carefully you pack your bags?

We reroute to Columbus Ave on the return. We see last night’s clubs, bars, storefronts and restaurants bathed in early Sunday sunlight. We pass some interesting spots: The World of Ginseng, Asians.com and Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope studio-turned-wine-bar. I take many pictures of the Flatiron-ish building that houses Coppola’s restaurant.

Back at the hotel, I find my makeup bag, cleverly packed inside a straw hat.

Armed with brunch suggestions from the Hilton’s concierge, we head out again on the now-familiar Columbus Avenue to the Café Divine. And divine it is; the one-room cafe is constructed of beautiful, dark wood and glass. Tiny white floor tiles add to the Victorian ambiance.

We sit in one of the window tables, looking at the people dining at the sidewalk tables. A young, tattooed father hands a baby to the mother. She hold the baby girl to her shoulder and the baby flirts with us and laughs, inches away but with the glass between us.

Gene snaps a picture of an elderly patron sitting alone.

Mona Lisa: Now That's Italian

Are we going to find something open at this hour? We find bars with no food; we find tortilla and Thai and Chinese places, take-out places with a chair or two in an over-lit storefront with no bar. Many restaurants are closing down; I see staffers in the windows, putting chairs up and cleaning. Too bad we didn’t arrive a few hours earlier.

I didn’t realize how close our hotel is to the Italian area, North Beach, home of the early 1950s poets and writers known as the Beat Generation. We pass City Lights, the Beat bookstore owned by Lawrence Fehrlinghetti.

Gene spots Ristorante Mona Lisa up the street and it looks open. The Mona Lisa is indeed open late, a long, narrow, sentimentally gaudy Italian restaurant, decorated with gigantic chandeliers and Renaissance-era murals.

We are seated at a small table by a window. We watch a group celebrating a birthday at the table outside. The group has been there awhile judging by the number of empty bottles on the table.

Christmas lights trim the bar and climb up the lanterns over the tables.

The tablecloths are pink, I think. Even the outdoor tables have tablecloths. Pink tablecloths represent the desire to be upscale, rather than actually being upscale. Only simple white tablecloths make a white-tablecloth restaurant. No substitutions.

But pink or white, upscale or downscale, the food is the point. A gnocchi dish on any menu makes Gene happy and The Mona Lisa offers eight gnocchi dishes. What to chose? There must be fifty pasta dishes on the menu. I love pasta and I try not to eat it too often, but with a menu like this, I must order pasta. Can you tell I’m hungry?

Gene chooses Gnocchi Pomodoro and I have Penne San Francisco (when in San Francisco . . .) Penne SF has a creamy pink sauce and bit of asparagus and crab, plus whole pieces of stone crab.

After our meal, we walk through the friendly sleaze of North Beach back to the hotel.

Night Arrival in San Francisco

Landing in San Francisco 11 pm local time, we are wide awake and hungry. We taxi to the San Francisco Hilton in the Financial District. I am surprised; I have been here before. I stayed here on a business trip last year when the entire town was booked for an Oracle convention. I was here for two nights at $750 a night. (I think we’re paying $120.)

I walk into our 24^th floor room and I am sure it is the same room I stayed in before. Of course, there could be a number of rooms with the same layout, but I still suspect it is the same room. The downtown view from the window feels identical.

The desk clerk informs us the hotel restaurant is closed and recommends we walk to Columbus Avenue, three blocks up. On Columbus, we see a few gentlemen’s bars and a prostitute or two hanging on the street corner. Gene remarks that there is something benign about San Francisco sleaze.