Weekend Getaway

This weekend I met my parents in San Francisco, for my first real San Francisco trip. I'd been to Fisherman's Wharf three times before, all on detours to elsewhere - a science trip in 8th grade, a college tour in 11th grade, a road trip with a friend from Provo to LA to Portland in college. These three trips left me feeling like I'd been to San Francisco, but had never really seen San Francisco, and this weekend's trip was meant to remedy that.

It wasn't a long vacation - I drove away from the Salt Lake Airport 48 hours after I'd first arrived there. But it was much more satisfactory, as far as San Francisco-seeing goes. We rode a trolley,  bought chocolate at Ghiradelli Square, toured restored sea vessels on the bay, wandered through the Saturday farmer's market, walked down Lombard Street, got free milkshakes when a baby mouse ran by our feet while we were eating lunch at a local hamburger joint, saw the murals in Coit Tower, wandered through Chinatown, bought books at the City Lights Bookstore, rode the streetcars,* and got a firsthand view of Occupy San Francisco when our streetcar broke down just outside their main encampment.

I think one of the most fun things about spending time in a famous city is just how familiar it all feels. I remember feeling this way when I first went to Washington, D.C., to New York City, to London. I'd already spent so much time there via books and movies and television shows and history lessons that it was a little strange to experience the city as a place that actually existed in real life. San Francisco is that kind of city. It was hard not to wander the streets and think of Full House, Vertigo, The Joy Luck Club, and all the images of the San Francisco earthquakes, both the 1906 one and the 1989 one, that haunted my childhood (but we didn't experience any earthquakes, for which I was grateful).

Speaking of disasters, riding trolleys up and down the steep San Francisco hills is a tiny, tiny bit unnerving. I asked my dad (just out of curiosity) if there had ever been such a thing as a runaway trolley, and he said there never had been. But that's what dads are supposed say. So when I got home I conducted my own research. I had to wade first wade through pages of Google hits on the Trolley Problem, an ethics question that I'd always thought was about trains, but which seemed to suggest that a runaway trolley is at least hypothetically possible. Then I came across a news story from Cheshire, England about a trolley crashing into a car with an adult and child in it, which sounded awful until I read the story and realized that in England a "trolley" is a shopping cart.

But I finally felt vindicated when I came across this piece, which provides all the gory details you could care to find about freak cable car accidents. Still, I hope it doesn't stop you from riding a cable car next time you go to San Francisco, because the vast majority of people survive the trip unscathed, and it's a much easier way to get up and down the hills.


* Which are different from cable cars if you, like me, did not realize this. The streetcars in San Francisco are imported from all over the world, and each one looks different. You might ride in a streetcar from New York City, and then in a streetcar from Milan, Italy on your way back, and the Exit and Watch Your Step signs will all still be in the original language. Which is English if your car was from New York, but still.