MARIN HEADLANDS, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A.

2013-07-22, 14:33, JASON

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Everyone knows about SF market street, with all the high-end shopping malls and homeless drummers. And, of course, for any tourists anyone visiting S.F. has to go to the Golden Gate Bridge and attempt to at least walk across it once. For the more sporty, adventurous types they may be so inclined to actually bike across the Bridge. And, somewhere along that journey at the half-way point you look to the right at the famous Alcatraz (which, apparently if you don’t schedule in advance, you won’t make it; and, even buying in advance you have to wait forever on it).

Thorin and I went to London the past 2012 calendar year and ran into a Japanese store called Uniqlo, and about a year-or-so ago San Francisco opened up the first west coast branch up in the S.F. Market area, just down where the old Virgin Mobile and Apple store are (I forget that name). As natural shoppers who have an eye for clothes — especially cheap! — we decided to check out the store.

Uniqlo S.F. is actually a really nice place, we went downstairs and spent about a good hour there trying on all of the clothes and even snatched up some cool pants. However, here’s the thing about Uniqlo, every pair of jeans or pants are cut at a 34″ inseam! That’s okay, we are about 32 but that extra fabric that be danglin and tanglin at the bottom of your feet bags the whole look, so of course you have to get the pants tailored. And, Uniqlo, knowing this, do all of the tailoring on-site at the store. The only thing is, you have to wait. What’s waiting?

We give our pants to the tailor-ess (seamstress, I was feeling creative..) and they said the pants will be done in about 3 hours, so we’re like okay, let’s continue with the rest of our trip through to the Golden Gate and come back later. This was at about 11;20.

Now.. if you ask a tourist what they did in San Francisco, they will say the Golden Gate Bridge for sure. But, if you ask us , we will give you a hipster bitch answer and say, “Please, we went PAST the Bridge and into Sausalito.”

So we went into Sausalito and into the Marin Headlands, one of California’s National Parks. Since we had to cross the Bridge, the whole trip took about 1 hour for 6 miles of driving.

The location was actually nice and isolated, a little foggy of course, but was kind of like an isolated little place. You drive into the mountains and there’s a lot of green rolling hills everywhere, and from just being a few miles out of the City it’s really refreshing to actually see natural landscape still around in California. If anyone has ever seen LOST, it’s the equivalent of Ben’s Dharma group in little, isolated houses all along the way, located in between the hills.

A lot of the Headlands used to be used during WWII so there area has lot of ruins of the oldish, run-down hostels that the soldiers used to use in the Navy. We approached one and the exterior is tattered, kind of like those abandoned buildings in scary movies. However, we went inside and we foudn out that Marin had an artists-in-residency program running through the building, with all of the old furniture and rooms still intact. So, essentially the run-down barracks were actually still home to starving artists (creepy) with a resident chef that lived on-site, cooking for them! Kind of cool, being isolated off in a National park to get art-inspiration. I don’t remember if I took a picture of this since I haven’t developed the film since this post, but there was such a cool juxtaposition with the old framework of the building, while through one of the windows to the room you could see a large Mac monitor.

After exploring the grounds a bit and seeing the visitor center, we decided to hike a trail. I don’t know what it is with us and trails, but we never seem to quite make it to where we want to go. This time we wanted to go on a loop trail that led to some barracks or war memorials along the later end of the hike. So, while hiking up (and, mind you, this shit is STEEP!) we finally hit the apex of the peak and we see a sign that says “BOBCAT TRAIL.” We look to the map, and then find that the bobcat trail we were on intersected our current trail about 1.5 miles AWAY from where we were supposed to make a left turn. As a result, we never made it to our loop to see the barracks, and had to just walk down the way we came up. To see and read about further blunders of the sort, read our Joshua Tree post.. we just quite never get it right! We were a bit tired and had a family barbecue to attend to, so we decided to just hitch back down and call it a day. If you were to spend a good day or two there though, I’m sure the view of the entire Headlands would be breathtaking. When we made it to the apogee, you could look down across the entire Headlands and it was just sprawling.

But, let’s be real, the only reason we didn’t want to continue the trail wasn’t because it was long, it was because our Uniqlo pants were done hemming! Now we’re two pairs of pants each sexier.