San Francisco, Day 2

We woke up considerably earlier than we planned on. I think we set an alarm for 11 and we were dressed and out and about before then. We got some coffee at a Starbucks and then decided to try to figure out the public transit system so we could go to the Castro. It would have been simply unacceptable to not make the Gay Mecca our first destination. We found our way to the nearest subway station easily and then went into the BART station, only to discover we didn’t want the BART but the Muni. We paid something like $4.90 to get OUT of the BART station after having not gone anywhere on it and then tried our best to figure out the Muni system. We will partially remember SF as "the city of bad signage." The “friendly” lady in the ticket counter told us to use the BART kiosk to get change and to press “H” to do that. There wasn’t an “H” on the BART kiosk. Eventually we realized we just needed $1.50 each to get through. After we figured that out it was a simple matter of waiting for the right train to take us to the Castro. The subway in SF is amazingly clean compared to any other subway I’ve been on. We hopped on and noticed a cute gay boy get on at the same stop. We assumed he was gay anyway… gaydar really does exist. ;-) He got off at the Castro and we briefly considered asking him to join us since he was alone and clearly not from there since he was consulting a map but we figured there was no nice way of offering without sounding creepy. J warned me that the Castro is actually pretty small and unimpressive since he didn’t want me to be disappointed. For a gay boy from ultra rural Wyoming, anything is exciting though! About the only thing that set the Castro apart from any other part of SF was the abundance of rainbow flags. We walked around a bit and then had some lunch. We went into a cute little restaurant (they were all cute little restaurants) and had a late breakfast of frittata and mimosas. How gay is that? Drinking a mimosa in the Castro! It was fantastic and of course I had to text my friends to brag. After brunch we did a little window shopping around the Castro and I took a few pictures. I had my obligatory “Full House” moment. Apparently every single child of the 80’s is required to have a moment where they look up a street and either think or say “wow, it is just like Full House.” I even took a picture of the exact spot I was standing when I had my moment. Dorky. We were both all sorts of tuckered out by about early to mid afternoon so we hoped back on the Muni to go back to our hotel for a nap. We cuddled and rested for a while, which was fantastic. The cuddling turned into play wrestling and that was about a millisecond away from turning into trouble but we managed to behave ourselves. The “official” reason for this trip was because J had an interview for a job but he somehow managed to leave his dress shoes and dress pants at home and didn’t have a tie. Silly boy. So, we went to a Campers store and he bought some shoes that I was not so secretly jealous of. I would have bought an identical pair but that would have just been lame. Then we found a perfect pair of pants for him at Old Navy that miraculously matched his jacket. That just left a tie which turned out to be sort of tricky. We eventually found one at Zara’s and had to wait in line forever. At least the cashier was cute (or at least I thought so and then I saw him getting on the Muni in the Castro the next day – thank you gaydar!). We were hungry again and grabbed a quick burger on the way to the hotel. The rest of the night was spent relaxing in bed watching a House marathon. For a second night in row I got to go to sleep with someone’s arms around me.