#SanFran10yearslaterUsed in a sentence: "When I travel (and boy do I love to travel), I try to use the power of the hashtag to classify all the posts from that particular excursion, and the Super Bowl weekend trip to San Francisco was no exception -- hence the #SanFran10yearslater tags you may have seen over the Facebook a bit ago."
[I also use the power of the backdate feature on this blog to make it seem like I'm posting it a few days after the weekend in question even though it's been a few weeks and I'm very very far behind in getting caught up on the posting schedule.]
As you can hopefully quickly deduce, this is not the first time I found myself in San Francicso ... as that first trip was in 2007, ten years ago (in case math isn't your forte). Unlike last time, when the agenda included Alcatraz and Ghirardelli's and Haight Ashbury and visiting with Jen A and Travis O, this vacation was much shorter and was actually prompted by another tradition, which also has its own hashtag: #chasingtheSuperBowl (which means that each year I watch the Super Bowl in the city that hosted it the year before).
Highlights of this trip included getting picked up at the airport by a long lost relative with whom I reconnected on the Facebook (thanks again for the ride Suzanne MC!), a jaunt over to Berkeley (for the dual purpose of seeing the local Kaplan center and checking another of my Burger Quest stops off the list [yet more travel related traditions in which I am enmeshed]), and an afternoon at the Golden Gate Bridge. As magnificent as that man made spectacle was, I found myself instead drawn to the giant rock all by itself in the bay as visible from the far side of the bridge. Maybe it was the direct evidence of the extreme power of nature ... or just my mind wandering back to what the area once looked like long before the bridge was built ... or the fact that it spoke to my soul about persevering and standing tall against adversity. There's also a chance that I was just pleased to see the sections of green on which the birds were landing, giving me hope that life goes on -- and maybe even thrives -- in the most difficult of circumstances.
Regardless, *these* are the images (I'll share them in lieu of my usual companion links) from being in #SanFran10yearslater that will stay with me long after I left ... maybe even up until my *next* visit in 2027 ... aka #SanFran20yearslater (did I mention I love a travel tradition)?!
