A Day at the Beach

Who:  Sam, Ann, Cole, Kelly
What: Quality time with some sand and surf
Where:  Stinson Beach (right off Hwy 1 in Marin County)
When:  Sunday afternoon
Why:  Why the heck not?

Stinson Beach is really stunning.  This snapshot does not do it justice in any way.  Picture silky, warm sand, the sun glittering off the waves, scores of people enjoying themselves...all against a background of big trees, tropical plants, and beach bungalows.

We found time to do some hooping in between our beach lounging.  Cole did the teaching and Sam picked it up pretty well.

It was a beautiful afternoon that ended in a beautiful evening of seafood at a local cafe and a nice (but somewhat nauseating) drive back down the very windy roads of Hwy 1 to San Francisco.

The San Francisco Zoo

Two weekends ago, we checked out the SF Zoo.  Karie, Sam, and I actually chose this activity over shopping.  I know, shocking, right?

Yes.

This is truly even more shocking if you know me.  I am not a zoo person, an animal person, or a pet person (blame my allergies for that one).  While I have a soft spot for my owl collection, these guys, and the occasional narwhal, generally I remain nonplussed by the animal kingdom (although I do love me a good nature documentary).  I've been to plenty of zoos in my time, but going to the zoo would never be at the top of my list of things to do.

Unless, of course, that zoo is rumored to be rather defunct and decrepit.  Then, bring it on!

We were in the car heading to lunch at Nopalito when I floated the zoo idea.  Sam immediately brought out her Droid and began regaling us with tales of the SF Zoo's history.  In 1929, a man named Herbert Fleischhacker opened the zoo adjacent to the Fleischhacker Pool, which at the time was the country's largest swimming pool.  It was so large that lifeguards used kayaks to patrol it.

Although the zoo parking lot now takes up the space that the pool used to occupy, the poolhouse  still stands at the edge of the parking lot.  You have no idea how badly I want to get into that building to have a look around.  Especially when the Fleischhacker Pool Wikipedia entry warns that it is "currently derelict and occupied by the homeless."  Let me in!

{Fleischhacker Poolhouse}

Onto the zoo itself now.  I'll keep my commentary short and let my photos speak for themselves, but in general I liked the zoo's mix of old and new.  Initially I was concerned that it wasn't going to be defunct enough for me, but it turned out that most of the newer, gussied-up exhibits are towards the front.  The deeper you go into the zoo, the more likely it is that you'll see old, crumbling, empty concrete exhibits, overgrown foliage, and signs advertising abandoned animal houses.  You could say that my spirits improved considerably the farther we delved into the zoo.

{Sam, Karie, and Cole with a majestic giraffe posing in the background}

Before I discuss the awesome defunct buildings and exhibits we saw, let me say a few words about the live animal exhibits that we thought were cool.  First, the whole African area at the front of the zoo is pretty amazing and very beautiful.  Second, all four of us loved the gorilla family--four adult gorillas and one baby.  The baby bounded around, playing, swinging, and doing somersaults.  The adults lazed about in the grass, or in this guy's case, directly on top of an uncomfortable-looking stump:

We also liked the kangaroos, wallabees, polar bears, and penguins.  The most sad exhibit involved a lonely seal in a very outdated concrete pen.  I'm actually glad that I don't have a photo to remind me of that.

{A slightly dilapidated building within the zoo.  I'm not sure what it's used for.}

Onto the Pachyderm House, easily the most fascinating and rundown portion of the zoo.  This is a big, Art Deco building that appears to be empty now but used to house the elephants.  In fact, as we wandered around its perimeter (while I tried the doors in an attempt to find a way inside), Cole remembered visiting it as a kid when it still housed elephants.  That is just really cool.

After trying one of the big, faded red locked doors, Sam and I braved some overgrown foliage to peek into the windows of the Pachyderm house.  Here's what we saw.

This is just a portion of the enormous space inside the Pachyderm house.  You can see a lot of discarded items as well as the big concrete spaces towards the back that probably used to hold elephants.  Right on the other side of those pens are some empty outdoor exhibits that probably functioned as the elephants' outside habitat.  Makes me wonder what the zoo is planning for these spaces.

Onto the Lion House.  This building is really dated (think 1930s design mixed with a lot of 1970s tile) but is still in use.  The lions and tigers prowl around in pretty small cages along the edge that connect to their outdoor habitat.

I really enjoyed this framed photo of Old George on the wall of the Lion House:

Sorry, but places just don't memorialize things like this anymore.  It's sad.

As we left the Pachyderm and Lion Houses, we started seeing more empty pens and exhibits like the ones in the collage below.

On our way out, I spied this sign on the side of the currently-closed South American Tropical Rainforest building:

Very cool.  In fact, quite a few of the exhibits were marked with WPA plaques.

All in all, it was a very fun and interesting afternoon.  I really enjoyed visiting a zoo with a sense of history.  The elephant and lion houses, as well as the bear grottos, have been around since the 1930s.  And the exhibits with moats around the edges were some of the first bar-less zoo exhibits in the country.

But the SF Zoo isn't completely mired in the past.  In 2006, it named a baby bald eagle after Stephen Colbert.  If that isn't awesome I don't know what is.

Closing the Loop

This weekend we kind of unintentionally checked the two remaining ice cream shops from the tour off of our list.  On Friday night, we walked through thick fog up the hill to Maggie Mudd for a scoop.  Cole and her friend Anne tried Moose Tracks (a chocolate/caramel/crunch concoction), Sam got Green Tea and I opted for Birthday Cake.

We were all impressed.  Sam's Green Tea ice cream had a nice, strong flavor to it.  My Birthday Cake made me think a lot of a Baskin Robbin's ice cream cake--which might be my favorite dessert in the whole world.  That frozen cake, that mint chocolate chip ice cream, that frozen icing...mmmm.

Even though it wasn't typical ice cream weather, we were glad to have braved the fog to visit Maggie Mudd.  This joint gets extra points for the larger than life ice cream cone statue on display in the front window.

Yesterday, we spontaneously decided to drive up to Stinson Beach.  It also happened to be perfect ice cream weather (sunny, not a cloud in the sky, a slight breeze, about 70 degrees) and we just happened to be driving right by Three Twins, so we stopped.  I was a bit disappointed that Lemon Cookie was not among the day's offerings.  All of the flavors had either been whipped up or renamed in honor of Pride weekend:  Pink Triangle, Hot Cookie (a bakery in the Castro), etc.  We tried the Hot Cookie, which was vanilla ice cream with large chunks of different kinds of cookie in it and it was fabulous.  Even better, in my estimation, was the Pink Triangle, a very dark chocolate ice cream with a hint of orange in it, complete with little triangle pieces of dark chocolate.  This flavor gives Swensen's Swiss Orange Chip a run for its money.

After visiting all five shops, I can confidently say that Humphry Slocombe's Blue Bottle Vietnamese Coffee still tops my list.  Coming in at a close second is the Pink Triangle from Three Twins, followed by Mitchell's Mexican Chocolate.  I sense a theme here...do you?

Oh, Humphry Slocombe...You're Too Much

This third and final installment of the ice cream tour saga continues with the journey from Bi-Rite to Humphry Slocombe, the shop that we were most excited to visit.  This was mostly due to the Food Network's coverage of it and rumblings I'd heard about town regarding its crazy flavors.

{An incredibly cool building we passed on the way to HS}

If you paid any attention at all to my Google map, you might be wondering what happened to our stop at Three Twins on Fillmore.  Well...just minutes into the tour, we started batting around the idea of axeing it because we weren't sure if our stomachs could handle FIVE ice cream shops in one afternoon.  After our scoops at Bi-Rite, it was clear that the only way we'd be able to try anything at Humphry Slocombe was if we saved Three Twins for another day.  {I will be stopping in to try their Lemon Cookie sooner rather than later, though, let me tell you.}

From its understated blue awning and facade, one would never guess that an entire world of  ice cream riches is contained within the modest walls of Humphry Slocombe.  It was overwhelming.  In a good way.  Kind of.

{Karie pre-ice cream.  That soup can behind her head was Fetal Kitten-flavored.}

Now, the flavors at this place were so outlandish that we had no qualms about trying a few before committing to anything.  Sam tried the Salt & Pepper and rejected it, describing its flavor as "sweaty."  I tried the Peanut Butter Curry and really liked it, which led Karie to order it as one of her scoops and then promptly become disgusted by it ("I feel like it should come with a side of chicken and rice," she groused).  Karie tried the Milk Chocolate Passion Fruit and enjoyed it enough to order that as her second scoop.  So at least she had one flavor she found edible.

{Possibly my favorite photo of the day}

By this time, Sam was actually pretty repulsed by ice cream in general, so she ordered a cookie, thinking it might settle her stomach.  WHAT?  As soon as it was in front of her she questioned the logic of her choice.  It was a dang good cookie, though.

I ordered two extremely tasty flavors:  Secret Breakfast (bourbon and cornflakes) and Blue Bottle Vietnamese Coffee.  Secret Breakfast, besides having possibly the best name ever, was really pleasing--definitely a hearty cornflake flavor with the sweet bite of bourbon.  But the Vietnamese Coffee, which had little bits of coffee grounds/beans in it, was my favorite flavor of the entire day.  It was creamy, sweet, and espresso-strong.  Looking back, I really enjoyed my flavors together too--I mean, what's better than coffee with cereal?

We did note that the Humphry Slocombe ice cream left a strange dairy coating on the roof of our mouths.  It dissipated after awhile, but we didn't like it.  We did like the fact that HS had a nice water dispenser with glasses right on the counter.  Water is a crucial part of any ice cream tour.

We left Humphry Slocombe a little overwhelmed by ice cream.  If we had been physically able, we would have tried some of the other insane flavors in the case:  Jesus Juice (wine and Coke), Basalmic Caramel ("vinegar, vinegar, vinegar!" the sign said), and Candied Ginger.  This place definitely wins the prize for the most imaginative flavors.

{Tracking our progress from the Mission into Bernal Heights}

After making the hike up Bernal Hill to Maggie Mudd, we decided we just could not take any more frozen concoctions.  To our credit, we did actually walk into Maggie Mudd, but after about five seconds we were out the door and headed home.

Stay tuned for another ice cream tour next time the three of us are here together.

Bi-Rite or Bust

The ice cream tour continues.  Here's part two of the saga: from Mitchell's to Bi-Rite Creamery; Noe Valley to the Mission.

The kid-sized scoops at Mitchell's whetted our appetites for more ice cream.  As you may have seen from my Google map, we headed up Guerrero to 18th in order to get to our second stop, Bi-Rite.  The walk up Guerrero was quite invigorating, as it gets pretty steep in places.  This street is also home to some amazing houses, such as these two beauties above.  They made us think of Disneyland--high praise when coming from a member of our Disney-obsessed family.

{Karie happily waiting in line outside Bi-Rite}

Now, Bi-Rite was the only shop on the tour that we'd been to before.  It has basically become the pinnacle of ice cream for us, so I had to include it.  Karie was dead set on getting her signature flavor, Salted Caramel, but I decided I needed to try a brand new flavor, so I got the Cherry Almond.  Sam chose Roasted Banana with a peanut brittle topping.

Consensus:  AMAZING ICE CREAM.  Not a surprise.  The Salted Caramel was as delicious as ever.  I loved the creaminess of the Cherry Almond, along with the frozen cherries inside.  Sam's concoction was to die for.

Stopping at our favorite ice cream shop was not a mistake.

Next:  we make our way through the Mission to Humphry Slocombe.

Dispatches from the Farm

{photo from here}

Sam is working on an organic farm in Napa Valley for the next month.

She reports that the other workers are "dirty hipsters" and that she has a lot of time to think.

For some reason I find it difficult to picture a hipster outside of his urban habitat, where he slices around the city on his fixie in the perfect uniform of vintage plaid button-up, skinny jeans, and Toms.  Apparently, though, you throw the phrase "organic farm in Napa" at one of them, and they're all over it.

Having a lot of time to think while picking fruit in a Napa orchard sounds pretty good to me.

3 Girls, 3 Ice Cream Shops, Roughly 5 Miles: Part One

So we only made it to 3 of the 5 ice cream shops on our route, which came in at 5 miles instead of 7.1.  General consensus: the afternoon was a success, in that no one really got sick or had to break down and take the bus home.  I've got too many pictures to squeeze everything into one post, so today I'll cover our journey to Mitchell's, followed by later posts on Bi-Rite and Humphry Slocombe...along with things we saw along the way.

{My hand drawn map of the route}

As planned, we started out in Bernal Heights with our first hill climb of the day up to Holly Park to admire views of the city and to drink some water.  The weather was decent but not wonderful:  sunny, highs in the low 60s, with a wind that alternated between a gentle, welcome breeze and a very unwelcome gale.  After being pummeled by wind at the top of the hill, we headed down to Cortland Avenue, over to Mission and then to our first stop, Mitchell's Ice Cream, in Noe Valley.  I had heard that one of Mitchell's best flavors is Mexican Chocolate, and I was eager to try it.

{Karie and Sam fresh at the start of the tour}

{Sam and me at the park}

{Getting to and at Mitchell's Ice Cream}

Once inside this venerated shop, we took a number and started scoping out the flavors.  We actually used Sam's phone to record live dispatches of our tour, but as she and her phone are both up in Napa right now at an organic farm, I'll have to reconstruct our adventure from memory.  My aged mind cannot remember what flavor(s) I tried, but I ended up going with a kid-sized scoop of the Mexican Chocolate in a sugar cone.  Mmmmmm.  I loved it!  In fact, it would become my second favorite flavor of the day.

{Enjoying my Mexican Chocolate cone}

Karie made a bold choice and tried the Avocado, which she really liked--including its soft green color.  Sam got the Butterscotch Marble and also enjoyed her pick.

{Going, going, gone...}

Other things going for Mitchell's:  two nice benches right outside where a girl can sit to enjoy her cone; earnest employees; and placement on a relatively quiet street.

I will be going back for sure.

Thai Chile, Honey Thyme, Secret Breakfast

...are all totally imaginative ice cream flavors available at various ice cream shops in San Francisco.  Secret Breakfast, in particular, is one that has come up in my conversations with Karie several times now.  As a result (and also due to the general Shira love for ice cream), we started joking around about doing an ice cream tour of the city.  We decided then and there that it would be doable (and not even all that guilt-inducing) if we walked between locations.  We surmised that we could hit 4 or 5 shops in an afternoon.

{photo from Daily Candy}

This is perfect timing because Karie and Sam are coming for a visit at the end of this week today!  They are making the seemingly-endless slog up I-5 as I type.

Not one to procrastinate, last week I started designing the route for our tasty tour.  Though this city boasts great ice cream shops in the double digits, I narrowed my list to five.  Our tour will take us on a lopsided loop through Noe Valley, the Inner and Outer Mission, Duboce Triangle, and Bernal Heights.  I adjusted it so that we'll go through or past some of the nicest parks in the city--Holly Park, Dolores Park, Precita Park, and Bernal Hill Park.

I'm calling this undertaking "3 Girls, 5 Ice Cream Shops, 7.1 Miles."

Which shops made the oh-so-elite list, you ask?  Well, I chose Mitchell's, Bi-Rite Creamery*, Three Twins, Humphry Slocombe, and Maggie Mudd.

Practical considerations for this tour include wearing comfortable shoes, bringing a large amount of water, and limiting ourselves to one scoop at each joint. 

Of course, as I was mapping out the route, I started to calculate the probability of us burning more calories on our walk than we were planning to ingest at the ice cream shops.  Even with our 7.1 mile loop, which does include hiking up the north side of Bernal Hill (very steep in places), I don't think we'll burn more than we take in.

But that's okay.  You only live once.

Here's my ice cream-tastic Google map of the route:


View Larger Map

*Bi-Rite is not new to us.  But we love it so much, especially its heavenly salted carmel ice cream, that it simply had to be included.

Martha's Vineyard

Oh man, we had a great time in Martha's Vineyard.  It was really cool for me to see a part of the country I'd never seen before.  Everything was so New England-y and beachy.  Lots of weathered wood shingles everywhere and amazing gardens.  

It was great to see Ellie and Emily and to just hang out around the house too.  Ellie's dad's house is very charming and basically makes you want to just curl up with a book on the porch.  It was also great to meet more of Ellie and Emily's friends--mostly people I've been hearing about for awhile now.  Same with Ellie's mom, Sue--she was so sweet to open her homes to us.  She also made a lovely meal in honor of Ellie's birthday.  Mmmmm.

View Larger Map

We explored the island and saw the idyllic towns and their beaches.  Cole and I rented bikes one afternoon and took a great ride along the beach.  We had AMAZING seafood--grilled swordfish, fried scallops, and lobster rolls.  We had dinner at this wonderful restaurant called State Road, where I deviated from my vegetarianism in order to sample a cheeseburger with homemade pickles.  I had a scoop of ridiculously good homemade peppermint stick ice cream.  And almost every night was topped off with a visit to Back Door Donuts in Oak Bluffs for some delicious apple fritters, Boston cremes, and butternut crunch donuts.  People literally queue up in a parking lot next to a dumpster in order to get their hands on these little fried pieces of heaven.  

One of my favorite things was seeing the gingerbread cottages at the Methodist Campgrounds in Oak Bluffs.  They're all painted in bright colors and have the most intricate wood trim and shingles that I've ever seen.  Add to that shady lanes and lush gardens and it's pretty much the cutest thing ever.

There's no denying that one of my favorite parts of this trip was the EPIC spoons tournament we had one evening.  What started out as a regular game of spoons turned into a complicated and competitive match involving a plastic pirate and searching for a hidden spoon in a dark room.  It was really, really fun.  

Emily let me play with her digital SLR a few times and that was also really fun.  I really like taking pictures and it's cool to be able to do it with a nice camera that allows you to have some control.  I'm pretty sure I'll be asking for one thing and one thing only for Christmas this year.

More pictures from the trip here!

Steps or Slide?

I forget when this was, but on one of our many walks through Bernal Heights we stumbled upon something so intrinsically awesome and wonderful that I think I actually squealed with delight.  We had taken a walk up to the top of Bernal Hill (which is all parkland and open space) and decided to explore the west side of the neighborhood by taking a flight of stairs down the hillside, back into the area of streets and houses.  Bernal Hill actually has several cool stairways cut into the hillside, and the one we took this day was almost jungle-like, with leafy trees and vines and ferns everywhere.

It deposited us onto a cute street with a lot of cute houses, and across that street we found another stairway to take us further down the hillside.  Repeat one or two more times, with more cute streets and cute houses and stairways. 

Then, across the next street, we came to a small clearing with a sign painted in the familiar green "SF Rec & Parks" color.  It was a mini-park, set into the hillside, with the usual set of steps leading down to the street below. 

But it also had the most awesome set of TWO SLIDES!  This mini-park offers you a choice:  step or slide to your destination.  The slides are side by side, so you can slide with a companion next to you.  They're fast slides, and long, and shaded, so you could never get burned on them.  That day, we took the slides, of course, as a couple of older tourists photographed it all from the top.  The slides spit us out into more leafy trees and a beautiful succulent garden.  It was SO FUN.

Weeks later, I am still marvelling at those slides.  ONLY IN SF.  For some reason, that mini-park with its slides gets me more than anything else I've seen or experienced here.  When a flight of stone steps would have done the trick, this city chose to transform the simple action of ascending or descending into something utterly fun and whimsical.

I actually found some history about the slides here:

"A more boisterous park amenity--the city’s longest pair of outdoor slides--greets visitors to Bernal Heights Mini Park just a few blocks away at Winfield and Esmeralda. In the late 1970s, neighborhood activists, with help from then-Mayor George Moscone, turned the empty corner lot into a garden spot with spectacular views and a twin, 42-foot sloping steel slide. The highlight of its dedication in 1979 was the photograph of Mayor Dianne Feinstein flying exuberantly down the chute."

Next task is to find that photo of DiFi choosing the slide over the stairs.

Quake Shacks

This morning while perusing my new favorite San Francisco history website, FoundSF, I stumbled upon these photos of Bernal Heights houses that apparently started out as earthquake shacks following the 1906 earthquake and fire.  I think it's really cool that some of the shacks were turned into permanent housing and are not only still standing, but taken care of too.

Check out these awesome photographs of the earthquake shacks, past and present:

{all photographs from FoundSF}

Earthquake shack on Crescent Avenue (this is our street!)

Quake shack being taken from Precita Park by horses

Quake shacks on Shotwell opposite Aztec

Two quake shacks joined together by a hall area.  Read more about it here.

Quake shack at 164 Bocana

From now on when I'm walking around the neighborhood, I'm going to be on the lookout for the smaller, one-story houses that might be quake shacks.  I think there could be quite a few given that Bernal Heights was a largely undeveloped refuge area in the months and years following the 1906 quake and fire.

Old Is New

This weekend I walked past a hip little shoe store on Valencia Street in the Mission and saw several pairs of Dr. Scholl's in the window.

No shoe makes me think of my mom like these sandals.  I can remember the chunky clockety-clock sound that the wood soles made on the floor.  I remember her pairing them with '80s terrycloth jumpers.  And I remember how excited I was when I finally got my own pair, probably a little girl's size 5 or 6, with a red leather strap.

So that was one trip down Memory Lane.  Then another one hit me when I saw these sandals inside the store:

These are Saltwater Sandals, another type of shoe I had as a kid.  I hadn't seen or thought about them since I was probably 8 and I had no idea they made them for adults.

I kind of still like them.  But I foresee them becoming a staple of every Mission hipster's wardrobe in the near future, so it might be best to leave them in my past.  Plus, I don't own any onesies with which to pair them, and I'd like to keep it that way :)

**********************************************************************************

Today is the 19th anniversary of my mom's death.  It does and doesn't seem that long ago all at the same time.  I miss her and her Dr. Scholl's.  But I also know and feel that she's looking down at us from above and taking care of us.