Food and fun

Today Martini came to SF to hang out with us, and we ended up spending about six hours walking around the city. We started at StrEAT Food, which I pass every day on the way to work but had yet to actually visit. It's basically a food truck park, with fancy food trucks and lots of shaded areas to sit and eat - like an old school bus that has been converted into a patio/lounge:

They also have an alcohol truck, which none of us had seen before:

 We had a hard time picking (especially since there were TWO dessert trucks), but eventually Ben and I landed on jambalaya and Martini on falafel.  We shared with each other and both dishes were great, as was the sangria we got from the booze truck.

Ben is skeptical about sharing

Martini is not

From there we walked up to Smitten Ice Cream for some liquid nitrogen ice cream, just like we used to make in college. Except since these guys are professionals, they have special machines to mix the batter while the LN2 is added, instead of people wearing big rubber gloves and frantically stirring.

Adding the LN2

Emptying the mixer

The finished product - salted caramel ice cream!

Next we walked to the Cable Car Museum, which - while much smaller than the NYC Subway Museum that we visited and loved - was still pretty neat.

So excited!

I had no idea that the museum was also the powerhouse and carbarn for the entire SF cable car system. These four sets of engines and wheels (they are actually sheaves) are moving the cables for all of the cable cars in the city!

On the beam above each set is the name of the cable car line it serves

Each cable car line is run by one continuous loop of cable, which runs under the streets and is kept continuously moving by the engines in the powerhouse. The cars move and stop by gripping and releasing the moving cable under their track. Depending on the line, the cable loops can be several miles long, and need to replaced periodically - the new cables are manually spliced into the old ones, in a tedious process that takes around five hours and happens in the middle of the night while the cars aren't running. Geeze. It's pretty amazing that the system works at all, especially given that it is over a hundred years old and has been through multiple big earthquakes. Of course, once I saw the label on one of the engines I understood why it works so well:

"Philadelphia Gear Corporation" :)

The cable itself is about 1.5 inches thick, and really dense - they had small pieces for sale in the giftshop, and they were surprisingly heavy.

A spool of cable

My hand, for scale

The museum also had those old-timey machines that you pay a quarter to look into and see stereoscopic photographs, one had photos of the destruction from the 1906 earthquake and the other had pictures of historic mansions around the city.

Martini and Ben on the cutting edge of technology.

There was an odd and sad monument to Jack, Fido, and Tip, the three powerhouse dogs who were "intelligent, noble, and affectionate, and were cruelly poisoned by Burglars on the morning of March 9, 1891."

The next and last place we waked was so groovy it merits its own post, so stay tunes for part two!