With so little time to stop and feel what life is like in San Francisco, I’m forced to rush through my single free day here. Skimming across the surface of this place with the hordes of other tourists. It’s not that I think my touristing is inherently different from those around me. It’s that I wish it were.
I want for that perspective you only feel after a long time on the road. After well-earned and hard planned adventure, and gems/hidden treasures/beautiful places that were stumbled upon by accident. The kind of accidents that happen because you planned hard enough to make good accidents happen.
As it is, I’m constrained to the best-rated places on Google maps. It’s not all bad. The coffee is good. The views are stereotypical and I’ve seen the glorious art deco attraction of the place. I’ve wandered through china town, raced the cable car up California Street, and seen the sun rise across the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s not all bad.
But there’s more to see here. And I won’t see it. My luck of having travelled widely just leaves me with an accumulating list of places that I’ve visited but not really seen. The singularity of traveling in order to race bikes has left me despairingly short of seeing some of these places from the saddle of a bike. Goal: travel on bike more, travel for bikes less.