An Interlude By the Bay

After nine months abroad as a nomad and backpacker, I found myself back in my Tucson apartment with only a week before heading back out to visit the Bay area for the Xmas and New Years. Why such a brief reprieve in my estranged home? Well, I did suggest that Claire visit me in the USA. Alas, I only got her as close as San Francisco. The international cachet of that city, plus a New Years spectacular from LCD Soundsystem made it too compelling a call for her, and although it would have been much simpler to chill at home and start figuring out the next steps of my life, a clarion to visit San Francisco had me put it on hold for one more happy holiday before I’d really start trudging on.

I added on an additional few days of time before Claire’s flight to reunite with Kit, a Pacific Crest Trail hiker I got to be briefly acquainted with a few years back. We’ve kept up as kindred not only in backpacking but in veganism and shared counter culture views on high powered careers in tech. A cheap flight on Xmas eve and a warm invitation to join her family’s holidays made it an interesting surprise chapter for me. I’m glad I can still pull off dropping in on people seemingly out of the blue without a massive social media presence. Visiting Kit showed me some interesting new corners of NorCal, her town of Crockett and her university in Santa Cruz, as well as miscellaneous small hikes here and there. She, like me, is still looking into the most productive ways to spend her time, and is out in nature a lot, so there’s hope for us on reconnecting again soon somewhere in nature.

After a few days with Kit, I bounced from Santa Cruz into SF proper, dropping in on the airport to escort Claire in after arriving from her globe spanning winter break flight. From Tokyo, her itinerary back home to the UK included brief stops in Iceland and Norway, before coming my way. Setting out to Tokyo from SF would fully span the globe, which was my original goal with digital nomad last year before my whims kept me in Asia and Australia. That spirit, plus her loving indie rock and bicycle adventures, you can see why we work well together. We chose a hotel in downtown SF for the week before she was due back at work and made a pretty good vacation out of it!

We did a lot of the typical SF stuff, walking about as much as possible through the quirky corners, high points and other touristic draws of the city, as well as walking much of our way to the Golden Gate Bridge. As it had been about ten years since her last visit to the US, it was interesting reminding her of the more stark departures in culture between Japan and the USA like the ubiquitous, unctuous tipping or witnessing blatant thievery of transit fares or convenience stores. Claire’s not at all fragile, so it was interesting to do things like instigate benign conversations with strangers on transit (would NOT go over well in Tokyo) or stroll through the lurid neighborhoods like the Tenderloin or Mission at night with literal zombies walking the streets.

Even if SF is a city everyone can acknowledge is struggling, I still think it would be an interesting place to live. Undeniably, it’s beautiful with unique, temperate weather, near a lot of interesting nature and one of the rare US cities that’s fully walkable. It’s just the totally topsy-turvy costs of housing here that make it pretty difficult for anyone except the landed gentry or techies, with the rest at real risk of being on the street or living far off; technically, I could fit in, but of course I’d be contributing to these structural problems. However, it’s not like Tucson or any other US city doesn’t have similar problems even with drastically lower costs of living. I hate making SF a punching bag, but it does one no favors to gloss over its visible problems either. I just don’t know if the homelessness there is a fixable problem though without a national intervention, as it seems to be growing everywhere while California is spending record sums trying to stem it to seemingly no avail.

With another raucous time together in the books, a real farewell was soon due. It wasn’t too clear after this week together when we would next meet, but it wasn’t too glum as we figured it wouldn’t be forever. So we said goodbyes at the airport, her to her teaching and me to my relaxing limbo in Arizona, and stayed regularly in touch.

Well fast forward through a couple months of self-care, starting and stalling on projects, and no opportunity materializing in my lap, I decided to disperse my ennui with another adventure. I would revisit Japan during Claire’s teacher breaks and find Ellen once more in Taiwan, dust off my camping gear and do some international touring with my bicycle for the first time in five years with each. Fortunately, I still had enough money saved to burn for a few more months of play, and with all my gear owned, costs weren’t too severe. Who needs retirement savings when you’re living it up in your thirties. As one only lives once, off I went to Asia again for March and April.