John Wise

Up in San Jose, we must make time this morning to stop at the Winchester Mystery House where we’ve seen the signs on the freeway a number of times as we pass through this way.

A young man by the name of Wayne was our guide on this informative tour of Sarah Lockwood Pardee Winchester’s home. Sarah was the widow of William Winchester, who created the “Gun that Won the West,” better known as the Winchester.

What started as an 8-room farmhouse became a 160-room mansion with 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, and 52 skylights. Exactly why she built such an extravagant maze of a home after the death of her husband is part of the mystery that draws people in.

I was ill-prepared with our relatively cheap point-and-shoot camera to photograph architecture in a confined space. I probably should have had a 10mm lens for a good wide-angle with a 1.8 aperture for the lighting conditions, even though there are so many windows in this house.

From there, it was a short jaunt to San Francisco, and the main reason for this Thanksgiving drive north.

It didn’t take much thinking about this visit to Northern California and the Legion of Honor, where this bronze of The Thinker by Auguste Rodin stands out front. Originally known as The Poet, as it was part of a larger sculpture titled The Gates of Hell, it was meant to depict Dante and is based on The Divine Comedy. Obviously, we are not amused by any of this as we are here for a Mayan art exhibit and not an entry to hell. Though, come to think about it, how fitting is it for middle America if they knew that San Franciscan’s sense of humor acknowledged that theirs was a city that led to hell?

Sadly, NO photography is allowed of any of the pieces on exhibit and there is enough security to ensure nobody snaps a photo. So, how’d I get this one? With some amount of stealth and trust that the camera might capture something, I shot blindly. Thanks to San Francisco for hosting such an amazing collection of works; I only wish we had more visual memories of the pieces we were able to witness. We did buy the companion book for the exhibit, but as usual, the items that caught our attention were not featured enough.

Nobody stopped us from taking photos of Gottfried Helnwein’s work, but then again one needs to be careful what they use from his work to give an example of his controversial pieces. Nazis, menstruation, nudity, and deformities are normal elements of his work, and while Otto Dix played with similar themes, they didn’t verge on the photorealistic that makes one almost ashamed to be looking at Helnwein’s paintings.

What’s not to love about this piece titled The Russian Bride’s Attire by Konstantin Makovsky?

After leaving the Legion of Honor, we took a walk around the park the museum is set in called Lands End, which is also a part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The trails are well-marked but also well-traveled, though this being the long Thanksgiving weekend, they might be especially busy today.

Back into the core of the city, with Chinatown being our big draw after finding a parking garage at the corners of Stockton and Vallejo, which also happens to be just around the corner from the City Lights Bookstore. It was right near here 13 years ago that Caroline stepped into San Francisco and America for the very first time. That was back in January 1991, and if you are interested, you can visit a page with a few of those photos by clicking here.

Chinatown is still a magic corner of San Francisco to the two of us. We pass by the elegant eateries, the snobbish trendy places that are of such great appeal to the wealthy tech workers of this great American brain trust of a city. Shopping for trinkets and cheap shoes while taking in the sights of the exotic world of Asia represented on these streets is our cheat of needing to visit China for a small taste.

Time for the obligatory cheesy tourist traps to make sure we see the really important sights of the city before these kinds of places lose the interest of a public more interested in being seen than going out to see. This is the USS Pampanito submarine that is moored at Pier 45 next to Fisherman’s Wharf.

Next door is the Musée Mécanique that was opened by Edward Zelinsky who passed away a couple of months prior to our visit. Mr. Zelinsky owned one of the largest collections of coin-operated mechanical art on earth. There’s a lot to see here and the limited time we have before they close tonight will demand that we return someday to properly appreciate this labor of love.

San Francisco is an undeniably beautiful city, made more so at night when some of the crush of tourists and residents start to return home and to their hotels. We’ll continue our exploration, not wanting to give up on the buzz that happens here, like further south in Los Angeles. By comparison, the city of Phoenix enters rigor mortis an hour after the sun sets, allowing you to hear the sound of a cactus needle drop.

Our room at the Colonial Motel ($59 for the night) is over in San Rafael, so we were able to stop on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge at night for this view that should never grow old to us. Tomorrow, we continue our trek north.