San Francisco is a vibrant and very diverse city where you will see every type of humanity that exists on the earth and the economic disparity of those who have little or nothing and live on the streets through to the super rich tech entrepreneurs. Mostly you’ll see a city of people who are trying to make ends meet in the most expensive city to rent in the world. The city is a tourist gathering point as it has many attractions.
The walk started following a similar feature set to the 36walk San Francisco 2018 but diverged at the Cable Car museum to an all new route. This walk was different because instead of running it from a MyMap with a fixed route I tried something new and ran it from a Maps List and let Maps do the navigation from point to point which made for an interesting walk because not even I knew exactly where we’d be going before we started off to the next place.
Attendees were:
Back row: Terri-Ann, Stella, Paul, Torben, Alexandre, Diana, Valeria, Alejandra, Ania + friend, Julian
Front row: Penny, Illankovan, Paco, Jesi, Cecilia, Will, Tu, Julien
All names fixed - thanks @Jesi
We started at Union Square at the Hearts in San Francisco that isn’t there anymore with a 360 photo of the participants then trekked our way through Chinatown stopping at Eastern Bakery for our first noms followed by The Baked Bear for ice cream and cookie sandwiches then we headed up to the Cable Car Museum via the Peter Macchiarini Steps where we paused for a group photo before hitting the precinct around Washington Square for lunch. The fittest walked up to Coit Tower while the oldies like me grabbed a Muni bus up the hill to join the others. Most of us went up in the elevator to the top but some left the walk at this point to run to Golden Gate Bridge to try and get fog free shots. We headed down the Greenwich Steps to the waterfront to visit the giant poo and enjoy the Sea Lions and Pier 39 where we finished for drinks and dinner at Beer 39.
You can see the shared album from this walk here.
I enjoyed this year’s walk than last year because we had plenty of time to make our way from place to place as the group socialised, enjoyed the street art, shopping, food, drinks and people of San Francisco. There was no need to push hard or yell at anyone to move towards an unattainable finish like last year so we were all much more relaxed and spirits were very high and playful among the group. Good mate Torben knew of Beer 39 from a previous adventure so when he suggested it for dinner we knew it would be good. The beer was excellent and the food was surprisingly well priced for a tourist pier.
Penny and I had a very interesting chat with the docent at the Cable Car Museum about Australia!
The turn out was slightly smaller than last year because Connect Live was in San Jose and many of the attendees were already in that city on the day of this walk.
Accessibility
California has fairly strict compliance requirements for the ADA Act so most of the places on the walk were accessible. Even the Cable Car museum with its many steps has an alternate entrance. The steepness of the terrain means that some places simply can’t be accessible although areas such as the Greenwich Steps can be reached in sections by car.
Thanks for reading this and I look forward to your feedback on this post.
Paul
