Out and About...

As I've mentioned before, Dick and I enjoy taking long urban hikes around our beautiful city whenever we can. The weather was just beautiful today, so we put on our walking shoes, and headed out at 11:00am. We didn't have a particular route in mind - we just kind of made it up as we went along.

The first part of our walk brought us from our neighborhood in the Castro, down Market Street, and up Noe. We walked through Duboce Park, then made our way through to the gorgeous Alamo Square. The views from Alamo Square were so beautiful - what a nice clear day.

We continued up Pierce Street for a while, then decided that it would be fun to check out Japantown. For some unknown reason, neither of us have been through the malls at Japantown during the daytime - we've only been for dinner or a movie when all of the stores were closed. We had a great time dropping into the Japanese Grocery Store, and checking out the fun stores and restaurants in the malls. It was especially neat since we had just been to Tokyo - we felt like we were back in Japan! We had a nice lunch at a sushi restaurant - Yum!

After lunch, we started to walk up Fillmore Street. Somewhere around Fillmore and California, we looked across the intersection and saw our friends Andrew & Barry! This was a pretty odd coincidence, seeing as we were all pretty far from our neighborhoods. What makes it even more of a coincidence is that we had just had them over for dinner last night! Somehow, we've managed to run into Andrew & Barry several times across the city over the past couple of years. The times that I remember are: Golden Gate Park, Duboce Park, The Folsom Street Fair, and of course, in the Castro. It was pretty fun bumping into them once again!

After we parted ways with Andrew & Barry, we continued our way up Fillmore, and into Pacific Heights. We decided to take a nice stroll through the Pac Height neighborhood, and enjoyed the amazing views of the Bay. We eventually made our way down to Union Street, and walked the length past Van Ness Ave, and onto Polk.

Now we were in my old neighborhood (I lived here for 3 years about 10 years ago). We don't come down to this part of town very often, so it was fun to see how many things were still there, and how many things had changed. We stayed on Polk Street until we started getting into the seedy area of The Tenderloin, and decided to walk down Van Ness instead. We were getting pretty tired by this point (around 3:30) and thought it was time to give our walking legs a break. Lucky for us, we were right by the AMC 1000. We popped in, and found that they had a showing of X-Men 3 starting at 3:45. Perfect! We bought our tickets, bought some popcorn, and found two great seats just as the previews started. We enjoyed most of the movie, although I have to say, we both thought the last quarter or so was pretty questionable. I'm really glad we saw it, though.

After we finished the movie, we realized we weren't very far from the Van Ness MUNI station, so we continued to walk down Van Ness until we came to Market. At this point, we took the underground MUNI to the Castro Street station and walked home from there. We got back home at 6:30.

What a great day! It was a perfect day for a walk - it was sunny and clear, with just a bit of a breeze. After we came home and looked at the route we had walked, we figured out that this may have been the longest urban hike that we've ever taken. We just mapped it out, and figured we walked at least 5 miles today. Yay!

I'm pretty sure that we'll both sleep well tonight :)

update

Okay, this is funny....

As we were walking around today, I asked Dick if he remembered what we did on Memorial Day last year. He couldn't remember either, so I figured I'd just look it up on my blog when we got home.

After I just finished publishing this post, I checked my archives to see what we did last year.
Here's the post from Memorial Day, 2005.

Apparently, we take really long Urban Hikes on Memorial Day!

It's what we do.
It's our thing. :)!