Walking the San Francisco 49 Mile Scenic Drive.

I bought this book yesterday at Weight Watchers that I’ve been eyeing for a while: Walking the San Francisco 49 Mile Scenic Drive. It divides the 49 mile walk into 17 adventures so I took my ten-year-old son with me to try the first one.

The first leg starts by the Asian Art Museum, winds around Japan Town, and ends in Chinatown, then gives you a shortcut way to walk back home. I don’t go to San Francisco much because I have a tiny traffic phobia and I am always extremely lost, even with GPS and printed directions. Also I can’t parallel park, but I’ve always wanted to stop and see the stuff we normally drive past on our way to the same two restaurants that we go to every time we go to the city so we decided to give it a try.

This is so hard to not write boring. There goes any hope of being a travel writer. The guidebook said the first part of the walk was through an edgy neighborhood but I didn’t realize by edgy they meant kind of super sketchy.

We got a late start around 3:30. I was feeling nervous when we had to walk around a ton of people and a ton of their stuff. At first I thought they were having a community-wide garage sale, but actually it was just regular people who lived on the streets who were spreading their stuff out all over.

I get it. If I were houseless, I’m sure I would try to be a minimalist, but all of my latent hoarder instincts would take over and my shit would be spread out all over my tarp, spilling out of my baby stroller or shopping cart onto my neighbors' tarp too.

I bought my son a big gluten-y donut and stopped at this coffee shop to buy an iced tea and use the bathroom. I had to leave my son alone at the table while I peed and when I came out these two cops were standing next to him and I was like oh shit CPS, but I guess they were just buying donuts and looking for missing person because my son heard them talking about it. I guess all of my weird, neurotic, kidnapping-sensitive senses that I've accidentally passed onto my children were kicking in for him. I felt it later while were stepping over the urine puddle and grown men wearing shower caps.

Then we walked a little farther and I started recognizing landmarks like the Asian Washing machine church that has a giant cross that can be seen from above, but form the side looks like a washing machine agitator. Then we went by Bene Hana’s which made me abnormally excited since I love those kind of restaurants ever since seeing them on the Carol Burnett show as a kid.

As we walked, the neighborhoods got nicer and nicer. Whenever I’m walking through a rich area, I feel simultaneously no long poor and very poor. Like Pretty Woman trying to buy clothes on Rodeo Drive or Clarice Starling in her cheap shoes. It's painfully obvious that I don’t belong while also weirdly like I’m being developed into a rich yuppie, foodie, kombucha-drinking part of the rich people click.