(My Oakland-San Francisco Adventuring of 29 Sept-2
Oct, 2000)
2 Oct 00
I know better than to try
getting up to the Bay Area on a 2-day weekend. However, a good fare
popped up out of Marion Morrison airport for late September, so I jumped
on it. Next time I’ll make sure to get a flight into Oakland instead,
where the airport is more convenient to public transit and to the places
I tend to go. Also, the OAK-area lodgings are a bit nearer to my
budget.
After my 3rd flight out of
Orange County’s airport, am still not quite used to the experience.
It is really too small for commercial jets, and is surrounded by housing
and businesses. For takeoffs they rev the engines for a fast, steep
ascent, then they practically kill the engines and drift across Newport
Beach, only hitting the gas again when they reach the ocean. Does
not help that their single runway is shared with small “general aviation”
planes. Since I work across the street from SNA, I often get to watch
the Pipers and Cessnas seemingly cut in front of the big jets to take off
and land. They often have to veer sharply left or right just after
takeoff, so there are days when it sounds like the office is being buzzed
by Baron von Richthofen's Flying Circus. The landings are weird too,
as they seem to run the reverse engines at full blast almost as the plane
is touching down. Every so often at work I’ll hear a strange roar
and/or boom coming from the airport, startling me enough to at first forget
that it’s “normal” SNA noise.
Anyway, the flight was otherwise
nice, taking a right turn at Catalina for a nice view of the Los Angeles
city lights to the east. The skies were clear all the way north,
except for some tongues of coastal fog right down at sea level to obscure
parts of Orange County and the city of Ventura. From Ventura we were
over land in a straight line for SFO, which would have meant a great view
of the San Andreas fault line in the daytime. To speed things up
some I carried on both my bags, and took a van-bus up to San Francisco
instead of the usual SamTrans bus. From there I took BART (my, the
Market St. subway stations were a LOT smaller than I remember them being!)
to Oakland’s Coliseum station, poorly timed as the A’s game was just letting
out.
Was my first look at the BART
flat-faced front cars. They still have the pointier (I think of them
as “Great White Shark”) front cars, but their newer ones are more flexible,
as the front of the old ones can not be attached to another car or train.
They pretty much gave up on the cheaper but still amazingly useful color-coded
destination cards in the front window…only saw electric destination signs,
meaning one had to make sure to look carefully at the front of the train
as it comes in. Especially in the many instances where the signs
above the platforms have too many burned-out lights or diodes or whatever
they use. Yep, some of the stations and trains are a little worse
for wear after so many years. Methinks the cleaning budget must be
at or below 1988 levels, or maybe more customers don’t give a rat’s ass
anymore?
Saturday was especially manic,
bouncing from Pleasanton to San Francisco to Concord to Oakland, just taking
peeks at old haunts and covering the many additions to the BART
and MUNI light-rail systems since
I moved away in 1988. The Dublin-Pleasanton BART extension would
have been extremely useful back in 1984-88, and it did cause the area’s
transit district Wheels to improve service,
especially on weekends. The only Sunday action they had before BART
was a special introductory picnic and bus tours they had the day before
the system debuted in 1987.
As for the MUNI, the entire
system now has 1- and 2-day passes for tourists and transit lunatics.
This was the only helpful part of the tourist propaganda office at Powell
& Market. The “Muni” map they sell is neither authentic nor accurate,
and the only useful free city maps they had were not available in English.
The J-Church extension down to Ocean Ave. was really practical only for
connecting the route directly with the car barn next to Balboa Park BART
station, but as always the old stretch on Church St. from Market to 30th
St. is my favorite of the streetcar lines. The newer light-rail cars
were an improvement, though the outside color scheme (silver and maroon
or so) made them look like cheap plastic toys.
I then picked up the #29/Sunset
bus for its circuitous yet familiar route. It passes an expanded,
more upscale Stonestown mall, up green Sunset Blvd, past the old “garden
apartment” at 25th Ave. and Balboa (wow, the #31/Balboa now uses electric
trolley buses!), and into the old army base that is now Presidio
National Park. The base always was mostly open, so the only obvious
change was green grass replacing airstrip tarmac at the bay-front Crissy
Field.
I walked rather than bused
from the Presidio to the Fisherman’s Wharf tourist-trap zone. I was
more than ready for lunch by then, but the only familiar spot along Lombard,
Chestnut and Van Ness was a very crowded (and not exactly a fave anyway)
Mel’s Diner. Had a mind to take a cable car, but the line at the
Hyde/Beach turnaround was much too long, and I never made it to the Taylor/Bay
turnaround. I was not expecting to see a streetcar operating on Beach
Street…aha, did they finally build the long-discussed Embarcadero line?
Well, yes and no. Instead of the old plan (a separate line for Embarcadero),
what they have is an extension of the Market St. surface route up to the
Fisherman’s Wharf area, while south of Market down to the Caltrain station
is an extension of the N-Judah line out of the Market St. subway.
Oops, a bit ahead of myself
here…the F-Market is a permanent route which used to be just a seasonal
“historic trolley festival” instituted
in the 1980s after the street-level tracks were freed up when the main
routes were moved into a subway between the street and the BART tracks.
The rolling museum had had a variety of old and/or unusual cars from around
the world, such as a Melbourne tram, a tiny wooden Lisbon car, and a large
open-air thing from Brighton, England. All the cars I saw this time
were the 1930s-40s PCC cars, which MUNI still used in regular service for
my first visit in 1978. Each car they now use is painted in the historic
“livery” of different cities, such as Brooklyn (if I remember right, green/black/gray),
Los Angeles, and Chicago (I was not around for CTA streetcar service, but
the green/cream combo and CTA logo matched what they used on buses in the
mid-1960s). The cars were certainly popular, therefore uncomfortably
crowded and tough to exit quickly. I got off around Market and First,
hoping the El Faro burrito place was open. No luck there, so instead
I wound up at Yoshinoya up by the Hyatt Regency.
We actually have many Yoshinoya
Japanese beef-bowl restaurants here in southern Cal, but this is one of
the few up north. Not a perfect substitute for the long-gone Bay
Area “Tokyo Stops” (have yet to find anything like their “Chicken Tatsuta
Don”, or green tea ice cream), but unlike any Yoshinoya down here, this
one had all-you-can-drink soda. After a few more streetcar photos
and a couple articulated-bus shots for a friend, I went
back over to the Embarcadero for a nice walk
past the old piers, following the N-Judah extension tracks down to the
Giants' new ballpark (nice!) and on to the glorifed shed that is the Caltrain
depot. Hopped on the next N car there for a ride out west, then via
other Muni routes down to the Daly City BART station to cover BART's two
other two post-1988 extensions, down to Colma and then out to Pittsburg.
I then doubled back to Oakland to check out a couple other old neighborhoods.
College Avenue is more upscale than ever, and pretty much stays that way
all the way down to Broadway. The only one of my favorite eats, College
Ave. Burrito Shop, was still there but already closed at about 9pm.
Wound up over on Piedmont Ave., where Fenton’s Ice Cream was way too busy,
Peet’s Coffee was closed already, but Cybelle’s pizza was still open and
quiet enough. One dinner calzone later, I walked over to Broadway
for the #51 bus to downtown, then waited for-friggin’-ever for the bus
back to my motel. When I lived in Oakland you didn’t have to go downtown
for the bus to the airport area, and it was especially convenient when
I lived just off MacArthur on Piedmont. Looks like AC
Transit has also engaged in a bit of “straight-lining” over the years,
though not to the insane extent that Orange
County Transit just did.
Radio reception was unexpectedly
bad at the Motel 6, overload aplenty despite the distance to any FM transmitter?
Many of the tapes I made have since been recycled since they sounded too
bad to send out, let alone to keep. Did not help that so many of
my favorite stations no longer existed (KFRC, KBAY, KKHI, KABL-FM, KJAZ,
and more), were tough to tape (KFJC, KZSU, KPOO, KUSF, KARA, and so on),
or had mutated too much (KITS, and to some extent KFOG and KBLX).
KGO is still a good, well-balanced talker, KCBS will still do for news,
KCSM seems to actually have MORE jazz to make up for the loss of KJAZ,
and what little I heard of KALX was good. Of all the newbies, I could
put up with the urban-oldies (at least for the weekend specialty shows)
which now inhabit 98.1; the dueling alt.rockers on 97.3 and 104.9
really make me miss the 103.1 twins down here; KABL might be a decent
standards station but carries too much sports. Where are the Bay
Area tape-traders???
Sunday was mostly just an
A’s game. When I bought that ticket in August, it looked like maybe
the A’s had a shot at the wild card slot, and that only if the Red Sox
and Indians both went bad. However, thanks to a red-hot September
it would be the game that got them the division title. Nothing like
a nail-biter of a game (scoreless until the 7th) and a big post-game celebration
to wear out an already frazzled traveler!
Being worn out from all the
activity Saturday and by the game and the celebrations afterward, I never
did get up to Berkeley this time, but hey there's always another visit
(I hope).
Lunch, by the way, was at
a Fresh Choice
salad&soup bar, down at yet another old hang-out (Bay Fair Mall in
San Leandro). Had never heard of them before, but found their coupon
in the Sunday SF Chroniner-Examicle. Soon as I got up to the Bay
Area, I quickly fell into one of my old habits, that being to devour trees
at an alarming rate. Bought a daily paper or two each day, plus picked
up the two major weeklies (San
Francisco Bay Guardian and East
Bay Express) plus the upstart New City.
The BART and bus schedules
to SFO were much more favorable early on a weekday morning…two BART lines
and an SamTrans
express bus from Colma to the airport got me in what should have been plenty
of time before the 7:30 flight back to SNA. The line at the American
counter was already nuts, but they would set up an “express” line for earlier
departures. It’s really convenient to work so close to an airport…from
getting off the plane to getting my bag to walking down the street, I went
from plane to office in a little over 20 minutes!