Best Parking Spot Ever

I was pretty proud of myself.  Fleet Week, the Blue Angels, traffic, Columbus Day parade in North beach, Frank is just on the cusp of being willing to ride his bike in traffic, those were the variables, the question I worked on for days, like every year, is what is the best combination of cars, bicycles, walking, with the least amount of being stuck in traffic or waiting for parking, that gets us closest to the action for the least amount of effort.  So this year it was load the bikes on the car, park across town, way across town where nobody would ever think of parking, and ride along the bay, squeeze through the crowds at the Wharf, and end up on a beach or a nice bit of grass.

And then, sneaking through the Wharf, we see signs for the boat rides--see the show from a boat! One of the (many) nice things about having spawned like a dozen kids is that forty bucks a head isn't really that bad for three people.  So we got to tie up our bikes on a tiny platform next to the dock, and head out onto the Bay, from right behing Alioto's, passing Joe DiMaggio's dad's fishing boat on the way.

Exhausting, and windy, and wavy, and loud, but we sure were right there.  The boat captain (Captain Frank, no less), played the show on KSFO AM so it was fun getting to hear the play-by-play, and the background music to the show, the cheesy patriotic schmalz, not so much fun being subjected to AM radio ads at high volume.  It was exciting watching the planes do their high-speed passes, and after a while Captain Frank was driven to blowing his horn and cursing loudly, if ineffectively, at the Sunday boaters in their sailboats, and an even better show developed among the amateur sailor crowd as we watched the nimrods create some truly terrifying near misses.

The first mate made it even better, he'd memorized the Blue Angels' routine from previous years , and knew that they did three low-altitude passes from west to east, and that the third one was the ultra-high speed one where you could see the condensation envelope form around the plane as it just approached the sound barrier.  And so he'd watch the west for the incoming jets, and start screaming, "Here he comes guys!  Right on the deck!  Here he comes!"  And then  BLAAAAAMMMMMM the jet flies right overhead, a couple hundred feet away. Great theater.

the spot

Afterwards it was an easy if slow bike ride through the crowds streaming away from the waterfront, and when we got back to our little family car, our quiet, still and warm refuge, still happily parked on a quiet street, in the shade, just a U-turn away from two blocks of cars waiting to get onto the Bridge, with an extra layer of relief that it hadn't been towed and that I'd deciphered the eldritch installation of parking signs correctly, it was almost the high point of the day.  And I realized I had, in fact, scored probably the best parking spot possible for the occasion.

behind us, the line