For his Christmas present in 2019, I gave Jason a trip to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in San Francisco. Tickets were bought, reservations were made, and we were supposed to travel during the last half of March 2020. It didn’t happen. I’ll give you three guesses why not. Since then, our performance of this production has been rescheduled a number of times. None of those reschedulings have resulted in any viewings of the show since the pandemic has stubbornly refused to retreat on anyone’s timeline. Those reschedulings did result in us having plane tickets and hotel reservations last July without a musical to see. We decided to go to San Francisco anyway as it was in the initial stages of opening up “after COVID.” As we all know, this turned out to be a “between” not an “after.” Yes, we all are aware of what happened next in COVID’s story. Here’s what happened in ours.

After years of traveling with Jason quite regularly, I had procedures and lists for packing for flights, but after 18 months of no air travel, I had largely forgotten them. That made preparing more time consuming. It felt strange to board an aircraft again, and masks made the experience even more odd, not to mention stuffy.

As soon as we got to San Francisco, we set about undertaking the most important component of any trip, eating delicious food. We walked down the street to Bouche, a highly rated French restaurant. The waiter told us we picked an excellent time to come to San Francisco as all the restaurants that were normally impossible to get into were much more available thanks to the lack of tourists. We made our reservation for Bouche as we were walking over, so his opinion checked out.

Amongst the premier 20^th-century art museums in the country, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was too close to our hotel for us to miss. Therefore, the next morning we walked over to experience some contemporary culture. I was expecting to find works by Ansel Adams, Pollock, Warhol, Dorothea Lange, and Matisse. Instead, somehow, we missed those entirely and found compositions that surprised and absorbed us by artists previously unfamiliar. Anselm Kiefer’s canvases, straw and paint aggressively taking 3D form in dark motifs, were my favorite stumbling discovery. Colorful works by Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Mayhew, Gerhard Richter, Tony Cragg, Jannis Kounellis, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Georg Baselitz, and Sigmar Polke also enthralled us gallery after gallery. Yup, I just dropped a bunch of names and now I’m going to pretend I knew who they all were before our visit to the SFMOMA. Sure, yeah, I totally did.

After the museum closed and our brains had been stuffed over their fill lines with shades, contours, shapes, and spaces, we had enough time to take a walk along the Coastal Trail in the Land’s End region of Golden Gate National Recreation Area before dark. Our stroll started at the skeleton of the Sutro Baths, an engineering marvel built in the late 1800s that once held 1.7 million gallons of seawater and could accommodate 10,000 people in seven pools of different temperature. Partly due to the distraction of those remains, we didn’t get as far down this path as our desires could have taken us. However, we did make it to Mile Rock Beach, an isolated and extremely windy cove with beautiful views of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was gorgeous and so gusty I had to don a four coat and jacket combo.

The next day did not go exactly as planned because the museum we were planning on visiting was still struggling to shift into semi-open mode. So instead, we went to the farmers market at the Ferry Building and also did some shopping and tasting in its quaint boutiques. Macarons, empanadas, lattes, pan dulce, bunuelos, and farm fresh blackberries and peaches all made it into our bellies… yeah, we pretty much just spent hours intaking.

In the afternoon, we went to the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, the oldest public Japanese garden in America. We visited the Japanese Friendship Garden in San Diego a couple years ago. How did this compare? San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden is immaculately pruned and harmoniously designed. Its trees and plants are much more established than those at the Japanese Friendship Garden due to the difference in the ages of the gardens. (A large portion of San Diego’s garden was rebuilt between the 90s and 2015.) However, the Tea Garden is much smaller, less than half the size of San Diego’s. That wasn’t a big deal to us, but the crowds were another matter. When I think of a Japanese garden, I think of the peaceful contemplation of nature in a serene setting. (Yes, it’s possible this notion is based on pop culture references rather than cultural realities.) I don’t think of throngs taking pictures and exploring rowdily. The Tea Garden was packed, and that kind of ruined my calm moments. The people didn’t stop us from continuing our eclectic and copious food intake pattern though with a green tea cheesecake and some edamame from the Tea House.

We did find tranquility afterward just down the path at Stow Lake, which is also in Golden Gate Park. Although manmade, this lake predates the turn of the 20^th century and gives no hint of its fabricated origin. As the park’s largest body of water, it took us an hour to loop the paths around its shores and island, Strawberry Hill. Its Chinese Pavilion proved a much more suitable place for quiet contemplation than the Japanese Tea Garden.

Next week, the second half of our San Francisco adventure will be revealed. Aparecium!