What’s the best way to explore a new city?

Take a Tour

I rode my Harley out of Las Vegas with the desert blazing around me, engine beating time beneath me, wind singing in my helmet, mountains rising and falling and the long black highway carrying me west like a black ribbon thrown across the desert, Nevada burning in the mirrors while California opened ahead, the hot desert air went cool and colder, and somewhere beyond the mountains the Pacific was breathing fog across San Francisco.

The San Francisco fog rolled in from the Pacific like smoke drifting through an old jazz club, wrapping itself around the hills and slipping between the buildings. And into this foggy city I rode, into the clang-clang cable-car city, the horn-blow hill-climb brake-light city, the cold-wind-off-the-Bay city, Harley rumbling up one steep hill and down the next, streets rising toward the sky and falling away again, rows of houses stacked along the slopes and the blue-gray Bay flashing between the buildings, until Beach Street carried me to the hotel where I killed the engine, dropped my gear, stepped outside and heard San Francisco humming.

I want to see this city, I want to hear this city, I want to get down inside the bones of this wild old city and catch the rhythm and chase the stories and turn the corner not knowing what waits there because that’s the kick, that’s the road, that’s the beautiful little jolt of being somewhere you’ve never been before and feeling you’re alive.

So I went looking for the pulse of the city, for the jazz in the pavement and the poetry in the fog, for whatever wild little secret San Francisco was keeping around the next corner. Come on, city, show me what you’ve got. I took a tour.

And away we go through Chinatown red and gold, through North Beach and City Lights, through Kerouac roads and Ferlinghetti words and Ginsberg still Howling somewhere in the San Francisco fog, past Victorians clinging to the hills like they might slide into the Bay and Alcatraz crouching gray in the water, through gold rush and earthquake and immigrant dreams and rebellion and poetry and steel and concrete and cable and wire, yesterday piled on yesterday while today goes rattling right through the middle of it.

Then the waterfront, then the Bay, then something changes. There she is—Sea Change—hydrogen ferry on the gray water, commercial passenger boat moving on fuel cells, and suddenly the tour isn’t looking backward anymore because there goes tomorrow, right there, gliding across the Bay like the future had decided not to wait for us.

And man, that got my attention.

Because I came roaring out of Las Vegas on an oil-burning Harley with the Renewable Energy Age rattling around inside my head, and now San Francisco had put the idea right there on the water where I could point at it, hear it, watch it move—not theory, not another report gathering dust. People doing something about carbon pollution.