Bird on Beach, Bodega Bay

I saw out the first day of the new year after checking in at Bogeda Bay Lodge.  It was a bit like Timber Cove Resort, by which I mean more of a collection of cabin rooms than a traditional hotel. My room was really spacious and homely, with a large log-burning fire. The rooms overlook a nature reserve, and there were plenty more interesting birds for me to fail to identify.

The onsite restaurant was excellent, and I would certainly recommend the place to anyone travelling in this area.  I spent most of the evening trying to figure out the plans for the remaining days of my holiday.  I was provisionally due to fly back home on the following day, the 2^nd January, however I thought I would try and drag a few extra days out of the holiday on the basis that my colleagues in the office would be able to hold the fort and wouldn’t miss me for a few more days.

I wanted to catch a show back In San Francisco and I had spotted on Twitter than John Oliver was doing a stand up tour, and rather conveniently was due in SF tomorrow night. I managed to secure a ticket to see him, and move my return flights back a couple of days, which would give me another day and a half in the city to do some final sightseeing. Rather than check back in to the Fairmont, I thought I would try the Mark Hopkins as this area was familiar to me now, and it was only two minute’s walk away from where John Oliver was playing the following evening.

I had a few hours to kill before the car needed to be returned, so I spent some time walking around the headland at Bodega Bay.  It was lovely and tranquil early in the morning, with only a few dog walkers and early risers on the beaches and marshy edges of Bodega harbour. Soon it was time to get back in the old ‘stang, roof down and head back on Highway 1 to return the car. I took my time, enjoying once more the finest scenery the Pacific coast has to offer, before dropping my ride back in at the rental place in Mill Valley. I had noticed in close proximity to the rental drop-off was a branch of In-N-Out burger. My guidebooks had advised this small chain was possibly the source of the finest hamburger on the west coast, and I had already witnessed massive queues at the other location available to me at Fisherman’s Wharf back in town, so I took the opportunity to capitalise on my recent failure to be a vegetarian. In accordance with Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David’s Double Transgression Theory, which allows for a second wrong-doing if it follows the first in close proximity, I ordered a burger. The owners of the chain, like many Americans, are god-fearing Bible-waving types, and had gone to the trouble of printing Bible verses on the bottom of their packaging. I’m afraid their efforts were wasted on this godless heathen. The unnecesary proselytisation did not diminish the quality of the food. [Genesis 1:4 Ross divided the fries from the burger. Ross ate the burger and saw that it was good].

Mr Uber took me back across the Golden Gate Bridge for the fourth and final time and dropped me off at The Mark Hopkins. There was just enough time for me to head out to the Macys down the road and buy a couple of emergency t-shirts to tide me over for the coming days before I needed to get in line for my evening’s entertainment with John Oliver. If you don’t know him, Oliver is an ex-pat Brit and stand up comedian, who since 2014 has presented the leading satirical news show over here. He is well summed up by his excellent reports for The Daily Show, watch him take down the arguments against gun control here. Even better than this, was his work highlighting the ridiculous tax breaks available to TV preachers. Marvel at the glory of Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption.  Praise Be. Needless to say he was on form for his evening of stand up.

The following day was my last full day, and I wanted to explore some more of the neighbourhoods around me, including taking a proper look around Chinatown, North Beach, finding more of the Bullitt car chase locations, and if I could manage the walk, Mrs Doubtfire’s house too.

In the film Bullitt, at one point we find ourselves accompanying Steve McQueen’s Lt. Bullitt as he turns the tables on the hitmen who are tailing him. In this cat and mouse game, the hitmen loose their quarry in traffic before quickly realising that they have become the mouse when Bullitt’s car appears in the rear-view mirror. Bullitt calmly and diligently follows the bad guys through traffic to the tune of Lalo Schifrin’s musical score. With the exception of John William’s forboding two tone score in Jaws, this is the most perfect marriage of musical score to the action playing out in front of us. A close-up shot of Bill Hickman’s bad guy number one sporting sinister black leather driving gloves and tightening the seat belt of his equally sinister all-black Dodge Charger is the warning that it’s all about to kick off.

Bullitt starts to give chase in his 1968 Highland Green Mustang Fastback as the director makes Schifrin’s score conspicuous by its absence, allowing the sound of tyre squeal and V8 burble to take the lead for five minutes, giving us the greatest car chase ever committed to film.

The cars were driven primarily by Hickman and McQueen themselves. Movie afficionados and car geeks will often point out the shortcomings, like the fact that one car seems to lose more hubcaps that it has wheels, and McQueen manages to do more sequential up-shifts than the car has gears, and not to mention the VW Beetle that gets overtaken at least four times. Flaws aside, the combination of the very real nature of the driving, the pure sound of the engines and the backdrop provided by the San Francisco streets makes this few minutes of cinema the car chase movie makers have tried, and failed to emulate for more than fifty years.

Frank Bullitt’s gaff

Aside from the lobby of my own hotel, which features in the movie, today’s adventure starts just down from the hotel at the corner of Taylor and Clay, where Bullitt’s apartment can be found. From here I walked many of the streets which make up the route of the car chase. In fact, it’s impossible to retrace the route exactly, as it is cut together from various non-contiguous locations around the city, but a good part of it takes place in the streets of North Beach and Russian Hill, within walking distance of my hotel.

I find Bimbo’s nightclub and its distinctive signage on the junction where the car chase begins.  Further up the hill, I find the corners where Hickman accidentally (and genuinely) loses control of the Charger and hits a parked car before making a miraculous recovery, and the spot where McQueen oversteers and has to back up his steed, making the wheels of the Mustang jump and spin in reverse. The abundance of black marks on the road suggest this is a move frequently recreated.

Bimbo’s 365 Club, the start of the chase

I continue my walk to find the house occupied by the family in Mrs Doubtfire, another excellent film. Sadly, whilst any evidence of Robin William’s presence is long gone, it’s nice to be able to admire the spot.

I was starting to get tired from all the walking so I took a cab over to the far west of the city, an area I had yet to visit. We drove the length of the enormous Golden Gate Park which gives Central Park in Manhattan a beating in the urban park stakes, being some 20% larger. Eventually we reach the western extremes of the city at Ocean Beach.  After a walk around the area, I got another car back to the hotel before my legs started to fail me. 

For the second night in a row, I dined at the hotel’s restaurant, where they served excellent curried scallops, superb fries, and a lemon and basil tart portion that was so plentiful I couldn’t eat it all.

If this is correct, I was dressing as ‘Basic Gay’ from 1995-2005.

The following morning, I arranged a late check out to allow me to keep my room until my flight was due later that afternoon. I spent the morning in the excellent SF Museum of Modern Art. The SFMOMA is home to a great number of modern works of art, photography and sculpture. I am no expert in the field, but I lost count of the number of paintings and photographs that were already familiar to me and seem to have reserved a place in my subconscious. There are big names like Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Mondrian and Matisse, and plentiful opportunities to learn about other fascinating people that were ashamedly previously unknown to me, like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. I was surprised and pleased to see works by modern artists and makers like Tom Sachs, and even Adam Savage’s excellent collection of NASA space suit replicas.

Before long, my journey around the SFMOMA had come to an end, as had my time in the city. It was time to head back up the hill for the final time to collect my bags and board my return flight. Inspired perhaps by Frida Kahlo, or maybe just because I had already watched everything else on the in-flight entertainment system, I immersed myself in a more contemporary dose of magical realism. This time at the hands of Guillermo del Toro’s brilliantly cinematic The Shape of Water. After what felt a long longer than the advertised thirteen hours I was back in a cool and grey Birmingham, driving home and looking forward to seeing the total indifference of my cats as I walked back in the house.

As I sat in the kitchen going through the post and enjoying a proper cup of tea, the familiarity of the weird and beautiful place that had been my home for two weeks was already starting to wane. As I contemplated a trip to Morrisons to get milk and bread I thought back to last night, enjoying the view of passing cable cars on California Street from the comfort of the Nob Hill Club restaurant where I failed to finish my lemon flan. The reality of normal life had resumed all too quickly and it was sad. To butcher Tony Bennett’s words, I left my tart in San Francisco.