Boudi and Mouse in San Francisco, Part 2

MASSIVE EPIC SKATE DAY TODAY. After a bit of a sleep in, we packed our skates, gear and water (it was pretty warm!) and took the bus up to the Golden Gate Bridge. Yep. Our first skate for the day was on the bridge, and we went from the southern base of the bridge to the North Tower. It's apparently illegal to skate the bridge, but I couldn't find any information on that online. Travis from BAD had told me that she skated it with a couple of other people and was told it was a $10,000 fine (but they didn't get fined) but I didn't see that online, and the only thing I found was something about how officially the law permits skating "on sidewalks in residential areas", which is absurd. You'll see why in a second.

Anyway, bridge skate. We started at the south base, just past the pavilion. I have to admit that was I a bit nervous when we were gearing up, like as if we were doing this and then the cops would come and arrest us or tazer us or something before we even started. But nobody came to tell us off when we were putting our gear on, and a guy tried to not-very-surreptitiously take photos of us. Anyway, then we put our shoes and warm clothes into our packs, and we were off! (Well, we did stop when we got onto the bridge to be like "EEEE We're on the bridge!!!" for a second before we started skating again, but you get the idea.)

We took this picture AFTER our skate.
This is the only sign we saw the whole time
about the impermissibility of skating the GGB.

The bridge has a slight slope at both ends, and we had to also go around pedestrians and tourists. There's also barriers on either side, so we weren't going to fall into the bay (which has a 98% success of death rate) or get hit by cars. Anyway, the first part of the skate was just us getting used to the path, and there were some spaces between the pavers in the sidewalk that were weirdly shaped--like, every third one was slightly wider than the others--and there were also metal gratings and whatnot. If you skated too slowly over them, your wheels would get caught and you'd stack or something. There were a few times when I would get wobbly because I wasn't going fast enough over the cracks, but it was okay. Luckily nobody caught my flailing arms in the mouth.

Then we got to the South Tower! It wasn't very busy so we could stop and take photos and have a water break and whatnot. There was a little bit of getting around tourists taking photos of giant orange metal rivets and whatever, but nothing that couldn't be done by hopping around on toe stops. After that, we kept skating onwards. By this time traffic was picking up a bit (it was about 12:30 or so) but it wasn't giant tour groups or anything, so it wasn't too tricky to negotiate.

It wasn't clear if we were pedestrians or bicycles.

I think after this point we kind of realised that we would be okay skating the bridge and wouldn't stack and die (although I guess getting tazered was still a real possibility). But then we started to enjoy ourselves on the skate, rather than more "oh god let's just hurry up and do this". People were looking at us all in our gear and stuff, and kids would point and smile and one guy on a bike was like "Roller skates! That's awesome!" and everyone was really happy and excited that we were skating the bridge. I think that made us a bit more confident with what we were doing, and we were smiling back and stuff. We got to the halfway point (the dip in the cable) pretty quickly, and then after that the bridge started on a gentle slope downhill towards the northern base. There was a bit more plow stopping that had to happen here, but it wasn't too bad.

Note random Asian tourist umbrella lady
who basically came around the blind corner
and didn't stop staring at us for 5 minutes.

We got to the North Tower and had another break. The slope down from that to the Northern Base is a bit steeper, and it wasn't clear where we could stop afterwards. (Later, it turned out that we could have stopped in a little concrete section near the base, but we couldn't see it from where we were.) Anyway, we then turned around and headed back to the Southern Base. We also stopped for some photos again, and ended our skate at the Southern Base before the blind corner. Basically, at this corner, pedestrians go one way, and cyclists another, but the cycling thing is hella steep and kind of dangerous (since it's a giant steep hairpin with no barriers). So we geared down, did some stretches and put warm clothes on (it was cold and foggy) and hopped on a bus over to Lombard Street.

The only casualty on the bridge skate was a tourist who was leaning against the roadside barrier and then stepped forward without actually looking to see if there were oncoming cyclists and skaters, and I may have run over his foot a little. :P Well, I felt a little ba-bump kind of thing. Boudi was behind me, and when I stopped I said, "I think I ran over that guy's foot", and she said "yeah, then he made some kind of "Arrrggggghhh" noise when I skated past him". Whoops. But he seriously didn't look, so if I had been a bicycle or something he would have been much more run over than just "Arrrrggggghhhh". Also, I think he was wearing socks and sandals as well, so maybe he deserved it. I wonder if that's just traumatised his bridge experience or whatever.

The idea of skating down this part of
Lombard makes us want to cry.

Now, let's speak more about "traumatic". Lombard Street goes over the many hills in San Francisco and has ridiculously hilly bits, like where your driveways are at a 45 degree angle or whatever. We climbed up one of those hills (with our gear and skatey jelly legs) and looked down behind us and it was seriously a death skate. So we didn't do that. However, Lombard is also famous because it has this CRAZY crooked part with zigzags. We joked about skating it. Technically, it's a residential street (i.e. has houses on either side of it), so it's legal to skate on Lombard. I think if we tried to we might (in some possible world) have succeeded, since it'd be like shitlots of slaloms and plow stops. But tons of cars drive down it as a tourist attraction, and it does open out onto a road with more cars, and if that doesn't stop you, the wall of millions of tourists at the bottom taking pictures will. We just walked down it. Then we walked up it again. It's fucking steep and has stupidly shaped steps, plus we were carrying all our derby gear and it was the middle of the day and the sun was blazing hot, so if you can think of a better workout for your ass and legs while also taking in views of the San Francisco Bay Area and photobombing like 20 tourist shots, I'd like to hear it.

*random nod to CRDL*

At the top of Lombard, we caught a cable car down to Fisherman's Wharf. Now, I didn't take any photos on the cable car because it was like how it is in the movies with people hanging off the sides. Specifically, we were hanging off the sides of the cable car, since it was full by the time we caught it. I now have hulk arm from holding onto the cable car with one arm, which also happened to be the arm that my backpack and skates were hanging off (because I didn't have time to put my other arm through my pack strap). And there was one part when our cable car was going downhill and another was coming uphill and we were SO close to the people on the other car we could have high fived them. I had to derby stance the whole way down to not fall out or drop my gear. But then at the bottom we were just north of Fisherman's Wharf, and it was almost on 2pm and we hadn't eaten since breakfast.

We went to Alioto's and ordered from their "Fried foods in a basket" section of the menu. Seriously, that is what it is called. Fried calamari and fried fish and lots of chips, nom. It also came with salad (pfffft) or clam chowder. YES PLEASE. They also gave us half a baguette and like six hundred pats of butter before our food and we pretty much inhaled everything. I even made my own bread bowl for my chowder too because I am classy.

NOMTASTIC.