Tomorrow we leave for L.A. to catch our flight back home. We’ll travel by Greyhound bus because it’s the only transport that can get us there with enough time spare to be processed at the airport. It will be a very early start so we’ve already started packing.
This morning, after the long walk to Greyhound, we took the ferry to Sausalito, a tourist resort like Noosa or Byron Bay, across the bay, which ought to have given us grand views of the Golden Gate Bridge; but the fog was so thick you could hardly see the surrounding water. I guess this is the fog that keeps alive the redwoods at Muir Woods. The ferryman kept sounding the fog horn because visibility was literally next to nothing.
At Sausalito we spied a long queue waiting to buy hamburgers; so we joined them. They were being made right before eyes, cooked over a flame, and put together on an assembly line of carefully labelled grease-proof paper. They were good! By the time we had eaten ours, the queue had doubled in length down along the street. By the way, the shop was barely two+ metres wide and manned by three Spanish-speaking brothers. What a gold mine of a business!
We took the bus back to SF to avoid the lingering fog (already about 2.00pm) and bought ourselves something to take home – Glenys bought jeans, I bought Bose speakers for ($99). Outside Macy’s we saw a young guy being tackled to the ground by three other young guys. To me it looked like a mugging, but the ‘muggers’ were Macy’s security, and the guy on the pavement was a shoplifter. In the scuffle another guy escaped, dropped his loot, but retrieved it before running into the hands of other members of the security team around the corner. Boonah is going to seem very dull after all we’ve seen over these past five weeks!
Along the way we’ve seen the doubles of many people back home – including some of you. And, believe it or not, we saw a woman from West End in the crowd yesterday. We don’t know her personally but when we lived there she would often ask us to light her cigarette or lend her some money.
Don’t get me wrong about SF, it’s a beautiful city, built on many hills, overlooking a spectacular bay, and has a so much to enjoy. Sadly, it is also home to many broken people who line the streets just back from the middle of downtown. I guess if you’re down-and-out, SF would be a nice place to live. I can’t help thinking back to the 1960s and 70s when we were urged, in song, to wear some flowers in our hair if we were coming to San Francisco. I guess many came hoping to find a nirvana, but never did. After a while the drugs don’t work, and they leave you ‘unfixably’ damaged. Thank God, we got rescued before we crossed that point of no return.
In My Life 
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