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.