Last Weekend

Ben's internship ends August 1, but next weekend we'll be at a wedding in Ann Arbor (woohoo!) so this is our last weekend in the city. Last night we met our friend in Oakland after work for a sunset hike through Redwood Regional Park, which was lovely.

It's hard to take a picture with a sunset in the background.

It's only about 20 minutes to reach the top, but it's basically straight uphill to get there - we were panting and sweaty by the time we reached the summit, but the view was worth it.

View from the top.

From there it's another hour, but it's gently downhill and through the redwoods. It was crazy how efficiently they blocked out the light - it was dimming by the time we got there, but in the redwoods it looked like night.

Not a great picture, but you get an idea of how dark it was in the trees.

After the hike we went to Oakland's Korea Town, where we gorged on kimchi and deliciously spicy meat of many varieties to compensate for all the walking we had just done.

This picture does not convey the fact that this was actively bubbling when it came out. Yum!

Today we hosted a going away barbecue in our shared backyard, so we could have one more chance to see all our Bay Area friends.

Friends!

People brought all kinds of delicious baked goods and California produce and beverages, and best of all there was a baby and a dog:

A baby! And a dog!

 It's hard to believe it's already time for us to go, since it still feels like we just got here. But we were very happy to have one last hurrah with everyone, and to smother our sorrow over departing with food.

The face I'm making about this pie conveys my feelings about this summer.

Tomorrow we'll mostly be cleaning and doing laundry and other moving-out errands, but hopefully we'll make a couple hours to do a few last San Francisco fun things on our last non-working day in the city.

Hiking!

Yesterday we went to the movies and ate sushirritos and drank all our fancy raffle wine, so today we had to do something less gluttonous to compensate. We started the day off at our friends' house with delicious homemade scones for breakfast, which doesn't sound healthy but then we spent the next seven hours hiking with them so it all works out.

First we went to Mount Davidson, which is the highest point in San Francisco. My favorite part about the walk up was these crazy hot pink flowers that were everywhere

A bunch of flowers, and Sam's back.

Closeup of the cool flowers.

Ben's favorite part were all the really tall trees that were covered in ivy almost all the way to their tops.

Ben admiring a tall ivy-covered tree.

We knew that Mount Davidson had a cross on the top, but from the pictures we thought it would only be person-sized.We were both surprised and impressed when we reached the top, and found out that the cross is actually HUGE:

Jeff at the base of the giant cross.

The top probably would have offered some really impressive views of the city, but the fog had other plans for us. We still got to have a lovely picnic, though, so all was good.

Foggy view

Picnic!

We caught a bus over to Golden Gate park, and went up the tower in the de Young museum. By that point a lot of fog had cleared and there were pretty good views of the city, but it was hard to take photos because of the backlighting.

We walked across the park, and along the way passed some buffalo.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Ben's "buffalo face"

On the other side of the park and North a bit were the Sutro Baths,or rather what used to be the Sutro Baths and are now just cool-looking ruins you can climb on.

From there we kept walking up the coastal trail, which afforded a really nice and only partially fog-obstructed view of the Golden Gate bridge.

 

We were trying to end at this place we had heard had a neat "rock maze," but when we finally found it we were a bit disappointed.

Sam looks on while Ben attempts the labyrinth.

Also, somewhere along the way we encountered Dorcas Street, and took a picture with the Dorkuses.

Our hike was largely planned using a book Sam and Jeff had on the secret stairways of San Francisco, which led us to lots of cool places, but also resulted in me having a dozen different versions of this picture on my camera:

Also, I'm not standing up for at least the next 24 hours.