With Muir Woods National Monument just half an hour outside of San Francisco, it was amongst our top priorities on this trip. It became our focus the following day when the weather report showed a big sun instead of a little sun in the forecast.

Redwoods are the longest living things on the planet and can survive for over a thousand years. The redwood groves protected by Muir Woods are humbling and awing, but the trail system that forms a tangled web through the heart of them is fairly confusing. We hiked four miles at the monument. On one trail? No, six. To loop back to our starting place, we did sections of Bootjack Spur, Camp Eastwood, Lost, Fern Creek, Canopy, and Redwood Creek. If you want to get off the main trail in Muir Woods, make sure you download or take a picture of the map. Without a map, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll end up on some wrong path. It seemed many of the perplexed trekkers we passed had done just that.

Please note, Muir Woods requires parking reservations, and those reservations have arrival times. We went in the middle of the week and made our reservation three days in advance. At that point, the slots between 10:00 a.m. and noon were already sold out. Visitor limits mean you can actually experience nature in nature, but they also mean you must plan ahead.

Since Muir Woods closes at 6:00 p.m. for unknown reasons, we decided to take a detour on the way back and use a little more of the available light. We ended up utilizing almost every minute of it. We went to Muir Beach in Golden Gate National Recreation Area on a whim and began a trek along the Marin Headlands to Pirates Cove, a forgotten pocket of beach snuggled against a toothy span of rocks. In total, we hiked 3.6 miles across chaparral-covered hills which plummeted to a sharpened shoreline in silence punctuated only by the haunting warning notes of nearby buoys. The vastness of the Pacific Ocean flooded out below us uninterrupted by the horizon. This trail was supposed to be heavily trafficked, but we only came across a few walkers. We were shocked such isolated beauty could exist so close to a bay populated by nearly eight million people.

In case you are curious, according to legends, Pirates Cove was actually used by pirates. Bootleggers in the 1920s reportedly utilized its cover for their spirited smuggling. Can I confirm these accounts are more than myths? Nope.

Our last day in San Francisco also happened to be Jason’s birthday. In our original plan, we were supposed to see Harry Potter that day. Instead, we started out with a walking tour of Chinatown. The tour was a great introduction to the history of the area and its current residents. We learned about ancestor worship, tried salted egg potato chips, ate Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory cookies, and discovered a bit about traditional Chinese medicine. By the way, fortune cookies aren’t Chinese at all but were the creation of a Japanese American. Also, fresh off the griddle they taste mighty good.

After wandering around Chinatown and eating some dim sum for lunch, we headed to the Musee Mecanique. The Musee Mecanique is a coin-operated arcade dedicated to antique, automated machines. Its collection of over 300 devices includes music boxes, photo booths, peep shows, pinball machines, videogames, and player pianos. Some of these apparatuses are rare finds that date back over a century.

And that’s how our trip ended, with player pianos belting out a grand finale to our coastal escapades.

Beyond the cancellation of the musical, how did COVID-19 impact our vacation? We were forced to change our plans frequently due to lingering closures. That led to some chaos and some of my favorite parts of this outing. We lamented that we weren’t going just a couple weeks later since full openings were expected as companies rehired employees and COVID concerns waned. Unfortunately, what started out as a hopeful summer we expected to fill with everything we’d missed for 15 months turned into agonizing deja vu as the Delta variant gained momentum. In the weeks after our visit, San Francisco moved toward more closures, not less. Instead of being the trip that was a little too early, it was a tiny island of near normalcy breaking the long span of continuing pandemic.

San Francisco was full of paradoxes on this visit. Little parklets, street-side additions built to allow for safer dining space, were everywhere. They illustrated the city’s resilience and adaptability, but the many established and loved places that were boarded up spoke to its fragility. San Francisco had struggled over the last 15 months and was trying to resuscitate itself. Regrettably, it was clear from the lack of hustle on the streets that the area was still getting only a fraction of its typical 25 million visitors, and any adaptations would be somewhat futile amidst the ongoing spreadable threat.