One thing about living in San Francisco is that people actually like coming here for a visit, and if it’s someone we know, either personally or as a long-time online acquaintance, they want to meet-up.
Lorna and Dave fall into the latter category. Really Lorna more than Dave, since he doesn’t participate in all our online shenanigans for some crazy reason, but we’ve known of him for as long as we’ve been talking to her, since she writes about him fairly often at Lorna In Wonderland.
We first hooked-up online about 2004-ish or so, but can’t really remember where. It was before Facebook and blogging for either of us, so Lorna and I surmised it must have been at an old website I maintained about working in Hollywood, where she frequently commented.
This isn’t the first time Dorian and I have met someone from the cyber-world. That distinction goes to a gal named Toni when we’d first gotten online way back in 1994. We lived in my mom’s house for a brief time just after she’d passed away and had gotten a laptop and dial-up modem hooked-up to the brand spankin’ new Internet via “Prodigy.”
It was agonizingly slow by today’s standards, but we had fun perusing these Prodigy message boards where you could talk to people in your area (crazy, huh?) and we ended-up having a few nice chats with Toni, who lived nearby. We later met in town at a local coffeeshop and had a nice in-person chat over pumpkin pie and coffee.
We’ve moved about a hundred times since then and lost touch with Toni somewhere along the way, but gained Lorna and Dave in the process, which made for a nice Saturday a few days ago when we met-up at La Boulange Cafe on Market Street.
Dave should really be online since he’s the chattier of the two, but he says he doesn’t care for all that readin’ and written’ stuff, and prefers conversing in person. Lorna had warned us that everyone likes him and we’d be sucked into his charming ways, and she was right.
Oddly, she’s the quieter of the two and is somewhat soft-spoken and demure, which one wouldn’t surmise after years of only perusing her blog and more recently, Facebook and Google-Plus postings. Online she’s quite the techno-babbler. We need to get her to write a book; I think she has a best-seller in that head of hers and it just needs to come out.
We got a start to our day with some tasty coffee and croissants at La Boulange, and then headed up to the Cable Car turnaround at Market and Powell because every first-time visitor needs to see that.
Finally, after all these years.. Rhodester and Lorna! At La Boulange on Market Street San Francisco.
Dorian shares a humorous anecdote with a different Dave for a change, at La Boulange Cafe on Market Street.
Lorna and Dorian at La Boulange.
I explained to Dave how the cable cars are a pain in the ass to run, they’re hideously expensive to keep up and very uncomfortable to ride, yet the city is stuck with them due to their status as historic icons of a bygone era. The line of people wrapped around the boarding area attested to their popularity, as the wait was about an hour long.
The two Daves doing lunch at The Ferry Building.
Lorna, Dave and Dave at The Embarcadero waiting for an F-car.
Lotta's Fountain
Between Powell and The Ferry Building we stopped at “Lotta’s Fountain” on Market Street, a gift to the city from actress Lotta Crabtree in the late eighteen-hundreds. The fountain is iconic in its status as a rallying point in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and fire, and it’s still the spot where a morning vigil is held each year on the anniversary of the event at precisely 5:16am, which is when the quake struck.
A seafood lunch at The Ferry Building followed, with a view of The Bay Bridge and Treasure Island. Lorna seemed disappointed that Alcatraz is too far down to see from the rear of The Ferry Building, but you can’t see Vancouver either and since that’s where they actually film that damned show, it was no loss.
We hopped a vintage F-car and lumbered up to The Castro District, which is a place Lorna has been wanting to visit for ages since she’s all supportive of human rights and stuff like that. I almost said “gay rights,” but it’s really all about human rights when you think about it.
Dave plays tour-guide for Dave and Lorna aboard the F-Car as it rattles up Market Street toward The Castro District.
We strolled, shopped, chatted and paid a visit to Harvey Milk’s old camera store, which is now a museum of sorts to pay homage to gay human rights. Then we wrapped it all up with a nice dinner at our favorite Castro District restaurant, Mystique, before loading-up Lorna and Dave on a train to head out back under the bay to their temporary digs in Oakland.
Above and below, we sat for a bit in Castro Plaza at the intersection of Castro and Market Street.
It’s difficult to see much of San Francisco in an afternoon, especially when you’re meeting an old friend for the first time and there’s so much to talk about. Talk we did, and sightseeing we did a little, so we hope that next time we can show them the other 99% of the city that they missed this time around.
Dave, Lorna and Dave at Castro Station at the end of the evening.
Thanks Dorian, for taking most of these pics!
{ 0 comments }
