About three weeks ago, my fam­ily and I jour­neyed up north to visit the lands of San Fran­cisco. Our rea­sons for vis­it­ing the area where var­ied. My brother was going to visit his girl­friend up in col­lege, I was going in order to visit San Fran­cisco State Uni­ver­sity, my Dad was going because he loves dri­ving on any kind of road trip, while my Mom and youngest brother went sim­ply because they didn’t want to feel lonely. I usu­ally despise road-trips as much as I despise a female who refuses to make me a sand­wich, but I actu­ally don’t mind trav­el­ing up to north­ern Cal­i­for­nia. First off, north­ern Cal­i­for­nia is only a six hour drive from Orange County, the drive is often scenic and beau­ti­ful, and most impor­tantly I get to remain in the state of Cal­i­for­nia. Any other kind of road trip is unac­cept­able because it requires more than a day’s drive, often across bor­ing land­scapes, and they require me to leave the state of Cal­i­for­nia. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for expand­ing my hori­zons and I have been on count­less cross-country road­trips through­out my life­time. How­ever, I’ve quickly come to real­ize that Cal­i­for­nia is the best state in the union and leav­ing it would be like giv­ing up a Fer­rari Enzo in order drive a Toy­ota Prius. It’s point­less, unre­ward­ing, and stupid.

With this in mind, I was look­ing for­ward to my jour­ney up north. I thought it would be a nice chance for me to escape the stresses of my daily life here in south­ern Cal­i­for­nia, and at the very least, it would be an oppor­tu­nity for me to ride my bike in a dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ment. Now, I have trav­eled up north in the past and the expe­ri­ences where dis­ap­point­ing. The peo­ple up north are lib­eral, and live an entirely dif­fer­ent lifestyle than those of us down here. While the north does have some beau­ti­ful scenery, I always felt that the gen­eral atti­tude and lifestyle of the peo­ple ulti­mately kept me from truly enjoy­ing what the area had to offer. But San Fran­cisco promised to rem­edy this. Whereas I vis­ited the most lib­eral and admit­tedly less pop­u­lated areas of north­ern Cal­i­for­nia in Santa Cruz, and Sebastapol, San Fran­cisco was a heav­ily pop­u­lated and bustling metrop­o­lis. I thought this would be much more akin to my lifestyle here in south­ern Cal­i­for­nia and thus, I had very high hopes for San Fran­cisco. Despite my opti­mism, my trip up to San Fran­cisco ulti­mately dis­ap­pointed me.

To start things off, there’s noth­ing to do in San Fran­cisco. South­ern Cal­i­for­nia is packed with a ton of attrac­tions that can keep a tourist busy for weeks, whereas San Fran­cisco just has the Golden Gate Bridge, which is admit­tedly impres­sive, but can only enter­tain a tourist for a few hours. San Fran­cisco State Uni­ver­sity felt like a cold, bar­ren, and heart­less cam­pus. The fact that I vis­ited the cam­pus while it was rain­ing out­side, and in the mid­dle of a fur­lough week prob­a­bly didn’t help those neg­a­tive sen­ti­ments all that much, but I still found the school to be dis­ap­point­ing. The idea of liv­ing in San Fran­cisco was very appeal­ing to me, and San Fran­cisco State Uni­ver­sity appeared to be one of the bet­ter Cal State schools, but as I spent time on cam­pus I came to the con­clu­sion that the school and the city just weren’t a right fit for me. The last and final dis­ap­point­ment how­ever, was the fact that rid­ing a bike in San Fran­cisco absolutely sucks.

San Fran­cisco, and north­ern Cal­i­for­nia in gen­eral, are con­sid­ered to be the most bike friendly areas in the coun­try sec­ond only to Port­land Ore­gon. How­ever, I found that this sim­ply wasn’t the case. San Fran­cisco is hilly, lacks bike lanes, and is sim­ply too crowded to safely ride a bike in.  Now I did man­age to ride across the Golden Gate Bridge, which was actu­ally pretty cool, but given all of the cycling lore that comes from up north, I was expect­ing a city with an intri­cate net­work of bike lanes, and thou­sands of cyclists. Instead, all I got was one measly bike trail for the Golden Gate Bridge that was about three miles long, and was paved worse than the trails that I ride here at home.

While I did leave San Fran­cisco feel­ing a lit­tle dis­traught, and dis­ap­pointed, I do rec­og­nize that the city and its sur­round­ing areas do  have their mer­its. The scenery and geog­ra­phy around San Fran­cisco is beau­ti­ful. At one moment you could be emerged in a for­est, and the next moment you could be rid­ing along the pacific coast, which is pretty damn cool. The archi­tec­ture is awe­some, and I hap­pen to love all of the build­ings that inte­grate cor­ru­gated alu­minum into their designs. As dis­ap­pointed as I was at the fact that  San Fran­cisco has lit­tle to to offer tourists, or vis­it­ing cyclists, it does offer a lot for some­one who knows the city and its sur­round­ing areas well. I per­son­ally think that if I lived and belonged in the city, I would love it. How­ever, the sim­ple fact of the mat­ter is that I’m too con­di­tioned to the fast paced, and con­ser­v­a­tive lifestyle of south­ern Cal­i­for­nia to truly enjoy San Francisco.

As any true film­maker should, I brought my handy flip video cam­era with me on the trip and made a mini doc­u­men­tary. I plan to pro­duce a vari­ety of other small doc­u­men­taries in the near future, under a cat­e­gory that I’m call­ing MEI Doc­u­men­tary Films. The pur­pose of these films is to sim­ply doc­u­ment and dis­play the mini-adventures that I par­take in through­out my life and to hope­fully improve my skills in telling an “off-the-cuff” story. I have a few other doc­u­men­taries planned to be released and so hope­fully I’ll be able to pro­duce a con­stant stream of nar­ra­tive movies, and doc­u­men­taries in the near future.