Golden Gate Bridge and Sausalito

Winter break was not as productive Lord of Three Realms-wise as I had hoped, but I spent it relaxing with family, catching up with friends, and grinding harder on research than I ever had. Three phone meetings, many late nights, and much eye strain staring into lines and lines and lines of code later, and I'm pounding out an abstract. Anyhow, I had a whole slew of posts I wanted to write, but instead I present this.

Golden Gate Bridge and Fort Point

There have been a lot of 2016 reflection posts, resolutions, and recaps. I thought about writing one of those, but what are years but arbitrary social constructs, and am I really new? But since the theme of Lord of Three Realms is and will always be to become a better version of myself, here are some quick goals for myself now that I am 22 (birthday was on Christmas):

• be a better friend and keep in touch with the people I care about
• be more efficient, have more self-discipline, and waste less time
• bear misfortune worthily
• more recreational reading and writing

Fort Point and Karl the Fog

Without further ado, here are some photos I took during a day trip in July. I've split the day up into Golden Gate Bridge and Sausalito here and then Muir Woods National Monument in a later one. I found these photos scrolling through my camera roll and kept turning that Mark Twain quote over in my head.

The coldest winter of my life will probably be this one in Boston, and most certainly not a summer in San Francisco. It was figurative language to begin with, but I thought it would be a funny blog post to write when it will be below freezing tomorrow.

Visitors to San Francisco should definitely walk across the Golden Gate Bridge if they are adequately dressed. I made the local's mistake of thinking I could tough out the wind, Karl the Fog, and the chill by wearing shorts in July, but I was wrong. The wind is intense and I felt a bit nervous for the cyclists.

Spend some time at the visitors' center to learn about the bridge, its history, and the engineering behind it. MUNI has a stop right at the front, which was also crawling with charmanders and bulbasaurs (I visited during the Pokemon Go craze of summer 2016).

The fog disappears

The variation in temperature and visibility over a mere 1.7 miles of bridge was pretty astounding. It took less than half an hour to cross and yet looked like two completely different seasons. San Francisco Bay weather, am I right?

I took a bus into the town of Sausalito walked around while waiting for a phone call. It's a charming seaside town with cute coffee shops, but I camped out at Starbucks because I had a gift card. A bus runs from Sausalito to Muir Woods National Monument, my final destination, but I dallied too long around the pier looking at boats and thinking about what it would be like to live by the sea and have easy access to the redwoods.

Boats

Admittedly, this was not a very in-depth post about the Golden Gate Bridge or Sausalito, but just a repository for the pictures I took and a prologue to the much longer post with many more photos about Muir Woods National Monument. This, too, was really just an excuse to poke fun at "the coldest winter of my life was a summer in San Francisco" while winter begins in Boston.

In any case, 2016 was a wild ride, and 2017 is a new year. Good luck to you all and thank you for reading my blog this year!