Golden Gate Park

Golden Gate Park is still as magnificent as ever.  I first saw it about 40 years ago, and it hasn't changed much.  If anything, it's been improved thanks to severe ocean storms and earthquakes. The origin of the park lies in nineteenth century San Franciscans deciding to compete with the newly created Central Park of New York City by developing a great park of their own.  The Golden Gate Park is the fifth most visited urban park in the United States.  Central Park may be the number one visited park, but the Golden Gate is 174 acres larger being 1017 acres.  Originally, the park area was sand dunes, but over a fifty year span, hundreds of thousands of trees were planted, and today, the dunes are a distant memory.

Japanese Tea Garden

One of the things I love most about the northwestern United States coast are the flowers. The climate is wonderful for flowers.  Golden Gate Park is filled with them.  The Conservatory of Flowers is a gigantic greenhouse.  The Japanese Tea Garden has both flowers and sculpted trees.
 The Rose Garden showcases the most beautiful roses I've seen since The Portland Rose Garden (which is the gold standard for roses in my opinion).     My favorite roses are the multi-hued ones, and this garden was filled with them.  Poor Drake, we were trying to catch a bus when he took a short cut through the Rose Garden.  We missed at least one bus as I lingered snapping pictures.

Speaking of buses,  I loved the subways and buses in New York, and I've loved the BART trains and the buses here.  The bus system in San Francisco is efficient, punctual and almost completely covers the city.  We've crisscrossed the city on buses.  Usually time is not exactly pressing for us, so if it takes us an hour to use public transit rather than 40 minutes to drive, we consider the extra 20 minutes as just sight seeing opportunities.  We're headed to our last attraction tomorrow - the Haas-Lillenthal House.  It's an 1886 Victorian which survived the big earthquake of 1906, and it's furnished with the original furniture and ornamentation.  It's also in a part of the city we haven't seen this trip.  We'll take the Bart into the city from Berkeley and catch a bus across a new part of the city.  

We've pretty much passed on the destinations we've seen before avoiding Alcatraz, the Piers, Ghiradelli Square, the cable cars, and a host of others.  This trip is actually our fourth time to San
Francisco.  Our choice of attractions this trip has pretty much centered on art exhibits, wine and getting to know areas outside San Francisco.  My favorite exhibit was "Gorgeous" at the Asian Art Museum.  Our last exhibit was at the deYoung, located in the Golden Gate Park, and we came for Modernism, a traveling exhibition from the National Gallery of Art.  I just couldn't resist dropping by the Japanese Tea Garden for old time's sake.

One of the unlooked for bonuses of this vagabond life is I'm getting intensive geography lessons about parts of the country of which I only had a hazy understanding of the lay of the land.  Here it's been fascinating to learn first hand about the microclimates which dot the Bay Area.  The weather can change by ten or fifteen degrees or go from sunny to overcast to fog by traveling ten miles.  From the viewpoint of the deck outside our door, we've observed the quintessential San Francisco image:  Fog rolling in over the Golden Gate Bridge.

Another real plus to living in the second most food mad city in America are the wonderful restaurants we've found here, and the joy of finding excellent produce in the Farmer's Market every Saturday just two blocks from this apartment.  I've been trying to store up for the restaurant desert of Sun City.  I suspect South Lake Tahoe (our next destination) will be somewhere between the two.

I close with a picture of one of the roses from the rose garden.  As always, there are more pictures for my art friends and my flower friends.   If you want to see them, follow the link.

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