Hmmm, it's the end of July and the amazing Up Your Alley event was approaching and we hadn't planned to attend. But as it got closer and everyone was announcing their travel plans, I got an urge to run away to San Francisco for the one day event. Well, ok, the street fair is a one day event, but the weekend of dance parties and social events has grown to keep people busy from Friday until Sunday night. Our friend Jake offered us buddy passes for an event when we first started the title year, and it looked like a good opportunity to take him up on the offer. So Thursday afternoon, we booked for Sunday morning and evening. Yes - a one day trip. Fly out at 6am and home at 7pm. Yes, we're crazy, but it's going to be fun! And fun it was! We had an adventure!
So, as I progress through this year, I continue to make mistakes in travel. I'm still alive, but these little things make me appreciate how well my boy handles all the details when we travel together.
Little things like - weather. It's summer. It's 90+ degrees in Denver all the time now. Why check the weather unless you're leaving the northern hemisphere. wrong. Mark Twain was alleged to make a comment about the summer weather in San Francisco, but nobody has been able to prove it.
We're traveling on buddy passes, so, we assume, full leather fetish attire would be inappropriate. So would the usual summer fare of shirtless and very little else. We opted for a classy compromise - kilts. Black Utilikilts - Mocker version, to be exact. Add nice heavy boots and a button down shirt, and we were set to travel in style. The title vests, phone chargers, and a few other essentials went into one backpack - our only luggage.
Luckey got off work at midnight, home by 1, and then to bed, only to be roused by my 3:30 alarm so we could get ready and off to the airport to catch a 6am flight. He was not the most cheerful puppy. We learned something new at the airport - the body scanners don't like kilts. Something about all that extra fabric makes them flag us as needing more attention. So we got patted down/felt up by the gate staff. The guy did not look thrilled with life at that moment. But we got to our gate, and there was room on the plane for standby tickets, so off we went to San Francisco!
Once there, we rode the BART to Civic Center station and had a lovely conversation about kilts and Burning Man with a stranger on the train. Then when we arrived, we emerged to WINTER. No jackets, no pants. It was in the low 60s, with wind and humidity. BRRRRR! First stop - Starbucks for hot drinks! Nothing started until 11, so we had time to kill, if we didn't freeze to death first. We wound up at Wicked Grounds and fell in love with the place. We chatted with the staff and looked at the art and took refuge from the cold in their warm little kinky cafe'.
When 11 rolled around, we headed for the fair and began seeing friends from around the US. There were far too many to mention, and it was great to hug and share their space and energy and be with them. The San Francisco K9 Unit had a booth set up with play mats and space to visit. It was so much fun to meet them and hang out, and we made their booth our home base for the day. We ventured out to meet the bootblacks and Luckey got his boots done by Nick Elliott- there were so many good friends there it felt like home. We met new friends as well, like Matthew and Pup Sky from Seattle. We'll be staying with Matthew when we make a visit to Seattle in a few weeks. As the day passed, we ventured out to get some lunch and explore the booths, find other friends, see the fair, but we kept coming back to the puppies and meeting new people.
All good things must end, so around 4:30, we headed back to the BART to make our way home. Once again, we were felt up by security personnel and got to our gate. Hmm, the standby list is HUGE. What's up with that? Oh, an earlier flight was postponed, and people are scrambling to get to Denver. What does that mean? We wait. And we waited some more. We knew that it was a gamble, and we chose standby flights...and this was my first time to do that. So we kept waiting until 11pm when the last flight went out. There was only one seat available when they got to us, and we didn't want to separate.
We grabbed a hotel room for the night and crashed hard. Luckey was a really good sport for running on 2.5 hours of sleep in two days. But when the alarm went off at 3:30 am so we could get to the airport by 4:30, he was less cheerful. Through the morning, we moved from gate to gate to gate, setting up camp near the desk and in sight of the video boards. Luckey napped and I watched people.
We had some amusing experiences while there. I discussed our kilts with two older Chinese women who were studying Scottish dancing. Their English was limited, and their husbands spoke even less. No, we are not Scottish. We are from Denver, Colorado. No, we don't dance. We like kilts because they are comfortable. No, they are not wool. They are very lightweight cotton (insert mental image of four Chinese adults examining the fabric of my kilt without exposing my bits). The husbands were amused and fielded a few questions through their wives. Nobody asked about underpants. I visited with flight crews and desk agents. I fielded more kilt questions. We sampled more food from the variety available in Terminal 3 of SFO. Six flights left without us. The seventh flight was our lucky one - we got the last two seats and headed home.
So our adventure concluded. We spent much more time in the SFO airport than we did at the street fair, and that's ok. The two day trip actually felt like an extended four day weekend, but getting home to our own beds was great. Time to wash the kilts and prepare for our next adventure!
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