POFA

SF MUNI is making their money on us this weekend, and it's a good thing Caspian likes public transit.

We started off the day heading to the Palace of Fine Arts. Only the "Birds Eye" feature of Windows Live Local (nee MSN Virtual Earth) comes close to doing this justice in pictures. We wandered around, Susan took pictures with our real camera and I snapped these with my phone. I'm beginning to like the look of the cheap camera - the pictures come out "pre-aged" due to the low resolution, fixed focus, and poor light gathering.

Or maybe I'm just rationalizing.

Caspian fed a swan, which tried to steal his stuffed tiger, and talked with some artists who were setting up easels to paint "pofa" as Caspian has taken to calling it. We didn't go into the Exploratorium since Seattle has a great science center and C wouldn't appreciate the difference yet. We wandered over to the Marina to grab lunch and sit and enjoy the scenery - the One True Bridge on the left and Alcatraz on the right framing Marin and topped by a cloudless sky. *wistful sigh*

Then we took another set of busses over to Sutro Heights to visit one of our Weirde shrines: the Sutro Baths. These are the ruins of an late 19th/early 20th Century aquatic playground, which finally met its demise in the 1960s. The ruins are amazing and since they're modern you can climb on them. There's a cave leading through the rocks and even the remains of rails which presumably once carried visitors to the baths from the other side of the peninsula. I think this site does the best job of capturing how we feel about this place. Googling will turn up other pages and archives, such as this one with a more general overview of the dearly departed Playland.

Finally we caught the Fulton bus back to the hotel to have dinner with Shelley, one of Su's college friends who is now in the Bay Area studying at Berkeley.