#Route101: Napa Valley / SF

If there’s any stretch of this road trip that I’d do all over again, it’s #Route29 through Napa Valley. This region, with its wineries and whistlestops, is obscenely picturesque, and had way too many photo-ops to fit into our schedule. Here are two pit stops and one drive-by through the car window. I love that this combination gas station & burger joint says: “welcome to wine country.”

x

I keep mentioning #SanFrancisco without posting anything from there, so how about a little nibble on this sugar cookie of a building to whet your appetite?

We were so very lucky to arrive here on the one day for weeks when it wasn’t raining nonstop. This, quite naturally, made walking around and pointing my camera at things a real tasty treat.

I love the light and color rendering on this film stock so much that I’m leaving this one unedited, save for some cropping. Nom nom nom nom nom nom! Tooth achingly delicious.

x

The one thing I found most baffling about this city was the transit system, and, more specifically, the apparent lack of upkeep of said transit system. And that’s saying a lot!

I’ve used public transport in every city I’ve been in for any significant amount of time, so it’s not like I get easily confused. Even Tokyo, where I couldn’t read half the signage, somehow made intuitive sense. And yet, this dues-paying member of the Transit Riders Union found SF’s palimpsest of oddly-branded bus and rail inscrutable.

Which, to a degree, is fine! I expect to not have to research a North American transit system before using it in 2023, but with some prior knowledge, some of SF’s infrastructural hieroglyph would have been deciphered for me.

What’s less fine is making a transit app that doesn’t necessarily work (as per one MUNI worker) or completely defaced stops that are, yk, just left completely defaced, or people in hi-viz in transit stations who answer wayfinding questions with “I don’t know.” It felt like this city had completely abandoned the transit riding demographic, if you know what I mean. That definitely put Seattle in a surprisingly better light, in contrast.

But it was still fun to ride the streetcars. At one point, we almost missed our stop because a guy started talking my ear off about film photography, seeing the camera hanging off my neck. So, it wasn’t all bad. Just weird for a city like this. And sad.

x

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *