All things bright and beautiful this morning!

I’m planning to head out to Alcatraz today, but I’ve just discovered that my camera battery is dead. So I have to hang around the apartment while I wait for it to charge. Callie is meowing outside the door. We’re becoming better friends, I let her run around in my room when Susan is home, but when Susan leaves Callie is out the door.

Yesterday was my first full day in San Fran, and I know don’t what I was so afraid of. Clearly my entrée to San Fran on day one was the worst possible side of the town to see, and the rest is just like it is in the movies. Lots of sandal wearing, organic food eating trendies, driving volkswagens.

I wandered around Nob Hill and found myself completely by accident at Lombard Street with a flock of tourists. I wasn’t ever planning on going to Lombard Street – a tourist attraction famous for traffic calming – but since I found it by accident I snapped off a few photos with the Japanese tourists.

From there I headed down the hill to North Beach and the bohemian/Italian heart of San Fran. Lots of good strong Italian coffee smells for a change as I wandered along Colombus Ave to City Lights Bookstore.

When I was about 17 I started reading the beat novels and poetry of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Kesey, Ferlinghetti and Wolfe. Fascinated by the beat movement the counter culture and the hippie movement that followed this free-thinking in the 1960s. Since I couldn’t make it back to the Arthur Miller library and I missed out on the Steinbeck Center – I was determined to spend a good long visit at City Lights bookstore.

For those who don’t know, it’s a bookstore originally owned by San Francisco beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and was the first place to publish Allen Ginsberg’s disturbing portrait of his view of American society – Howl. When he first wrote it in 1956, publishers refused to publish it and it was banned on the grounds of obscenity and it flashed red alarm bells with McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities.

Since then City Lights pioneered the cause of free speech in all its forms and was an important fixture in the history of the beat movement, helping to get authors like Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey published.

So I sat in an old rocking chair in the poetry room up on the third floor and read Howl from beginning to end for the first time and a few excerpts of Off the Road, Carolyn Cassady’s accounts of life with Neal and Jack (or Dean and Sal as you may know them from On the Road).

I’m not rushing for anything or anyone anymore. If I miss something, so be it. I’m not going to lurch all over town trying to fit absolutely everything in.
I finally settled on a small gift for Ben (who is the only other person I know who would have appreciated City Lights as much as me), and a book of letters between Allen and Jack, oh and a bumper sticker that says ‘Howl if you heart City Lights’.

I slowly wandered back to the apartment, working my calf muscles to the bone. San Francisco is no place for heels! and had a little nap before heading out to Golden Gate Park for the Outside Lands Festival and Kings of Leon.

It took ages to get there. And at times I felt so hopelessly lost that I considered turning back. Thankfully I didn’t. A little over two hours after I set out, I arrived at the right part of Golden Gate Park for the festival, with about an hour to spare before Kings of Leon took the main stage.

It was pretty standard as far as festivals go, but I was surprised at the amount of stuff people brought with them – like blankets and backpacks full of gear, and I was surprised by the lax security. In a country where you’re allowed to own a gun, there were no metal detectors on entry and no pat downs. Just a general look inside my bag, in theory I could have had anything in there.

I bought a tiny glass of wine (soon realised why everyone else was drinking cups of beer), and found a spot in the grass to soak up the festival vibe until the gig started. Like in Melbourne, San Fran has twilight in summer so the sun only starts going down at around 8.30pm.

Kings of Leon took the stage at about 8pm and played a great set of old and new stuff. All the songs you know from the radio like Revelry, Sex on Fire, and Manhattan and some new stuff that sounded a little bit country and went down well with the crowd.

I left at the start of the last song in the finale keen to get a jump on the departing crowd. Ha! N, you have no idea where you’re going. I should have followed the crowd. But no. My best laid plans didn’t really work and I ended up walking about 35 blocks through the streets of San Francisco before I was able to hail a cab for the rest of the ride home. Lucky I needed the exercise.

So I’m all set for my excursion to Alcatraz if only the camera battery would hurry up and charge. I’m a little overdressed for sight-seeing but it’s cold and I’ve just dropped off all my clothes at the Wash ‘n’Go before I run out of underwear and am forced to wear my swimsuit.

Camera battery is green – we’re good to go.