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!

The following day, also our last full one in the area, we decided to spend the greater part of the afternoon in Antimony since we didn’t anticipate being in its vicinity again soon. We rented kayaks and headed out on Otter Creek Reservoir. Otter Creek Reservoir is just over six miles long and a popular place to fish for rainbow trout. According to locals, the water gets packed on the weekends. As it was not a weekend, it was quite unpopulated. We kayaked nearly half its length, or what I’d like to think was “nearly” half its length, in the three hours we had boats.

After we got used to paddling, we found kayaking has a rhythm to it like running or hiking. Once that rhythm is established, your mind can wander. It was quite relaxing and a much different experience than kayaking in churning sea caves, which no sane being would describe as relaxing. The wind picked up close to the end of our voyage, apparently something that happens almost every afternoon on Otter Creek, and we had to work hard to propel ourselves back to the dock. Still, a repeatable experience.

Following kayaking we had a choice, mosey around our silo or take the one-hour-and-20-minute drive to Capitol Reef National Park just to do a few hours of hiking before dark. We opted to do that of course as we are not avid moseyers. We hadn’t been to Capitol Reef since 2009. Dumb us. While this national park gets less love for who knows what reason, less love means less people and that means more love from me. Capitol Reef, you don’t care if everyone loves you just as long as I do, right?

We jumped on the Chimney Rock Loop after noticing good reviews on AllTrails and its nearness to the park’s entrance. Wasting any of our limited hiking time was unacceptable. We expected Chimney Rock, a column of sandstone visible from the road, to be the main attraction of this trail. Not so. This path heads up about 300 feet onto the top of a plateau. As you tread across that mesa you can see Whiskey Flat, the Henry Mountains, Miners Mountain, the Navajo Knobs, the Fluted Cliffs, Fruita, Boulder Mountain, and Meeks Mesa, plus the silver, sage, and sienna confusion of the Waterpocket Fold. This is supposed to be an amazing trail near sunset. We didn’t know that beforehand, but, yes, it was amazing. Moreover, we only saw one other group during our entire trek. Gorgeous terrain set afire by the departing sun and no people? It was my favorite activity of our trip of course.

The next day, we planned on just making a straight dash for home with one little detour to the Butch Cassidy Childhood Home near Circleville. This led to us taking a different route back, which led to us driving near Fremont Indian State Park, which led to us spending five hours looking at ancient rock art. It was a vicious cycle.

Fremont Indian State Park is at the site of the largest Fremont village ever found with at least 60 pit houses, 19 granaries, and 26 other building. Sadly, it was only discovered on Five Finger Ridge shortly before half of it was scheduled to be destroyed to make way for I-70. Still, many artifacts and an abundance of rock art survived the highway and can be viewed at the park.

Although contemporaries of the Ancestral Puebloans, the Fremont were a unique group. Crops were their main form of survival, unlike the cultures that came after which focused on hunting and gathering. What became of the Fremont? Apparently, we know even less on that topic than the mysterious disappearance of the Ancestral Puebloans.

At Fremont Indian State Park, for the first time on this trip, we did not luck out with the weather. It was miserably hot our first few hours there until clouds and a sprinkling of rain eased our roasting. We just accepted the streams of sweat flowing through every crevice as we inspected Sheep Shelter Trail, Indian Blanket Viewpoint, Parade of Rock Art Trail, Cave of a Hundred Hands, Arch of Art, Newspaper Rock Viewpoint, Jedediah Smith Interpretive Site, Canyon of Rock Art Trail, and Skinner Canyon. Does that sound like a lot? It was only a fraction of the places to see rock art in the park. The rock art was almost overwhelmingly prolific spanning about 3,000 years.

Thus ended our trip, but what were our conclusions about Antimony and our unusual accommodations? The silo we stayed at, which used to store grain for cattle, was small, but its good design utilized all the available space. Notwithstanding the awakening we got in the middle of the night when the combination of rainstorm and metal roof made it impossible to sleep, we’d still recommend this uncommon structure.

And Antimony itself? The people of Antimony are friendly and proud of their little town. I’m not sure they should be proud of their cellphone service, but we thought it a nice spot anyway. On a side note, if you go to Antimony, make any reservations you need ahead of time. I’m talking ATVs, horseback riding, boat rentals, etc. Otherwise, owners will give you a number to call to make a reservation, a number you can’t call because your cellphone doesn’t work. We found the predicament both frustrating and fairly humorous. You may be thinking this information is irrelevant because you will never find yourself in Antimony, but who knows, someday it might be the unexpected answer to your would you rather.

And that is how our outing, which started not with a destination but an accommodation, ended up being an ad lib frolic in multiple national parks, state parks, and ghost towns. There are endless possibilities for discovery if you are willing to go even where your cellphone service cannot follow.