To put the principle of disconnecting (that I talked about in a previous blog post) into action, at 11am this morning I turned off my cell phone, packed some reading materials (Wall Street Journal, a book on education reform, and the Atlantic Monthly), and rode my bike through Golden Gate park to Ocean Beach. I could have taken the N Judah light rail (called the "Muni" in San Francisco) straight to the same spot, but decided that a bike would give me extra mobility once down there. A recent edition of Sunset Magazine (a magazine about things to do west of the Rockies) had a 2-page article on the coffee houses and restaurants in Ocean Beach, so I put the article in my pocket and headed down to the ocean.
(It was in the high 60's today, sunny, and with a fairly warm breeze. This made it a given that I would spend a good portion of the day outside).
So, I read the WSJ for the first hour while sitting on a bench near the beach, then rode a few blocks over to the heart of Ocean Beach. The neighborhood feels like a surf community - much quieter than places like Huntington Beach or Santa Monica, and probably more like Santa Cruz (these are my only points of comparison re: beach towns). There were a few choice coffee shops/brunch places. I walked into a shop called the General Store (I think) - a low-key, design-esque shop with some coffee table books, a few t-shirts, etc. Anyway, the most well known restaurant had an hour-long wait, so I biked a few more blocks to a bakery and had a curried chicken salad sandwich, with a biscuit as the bread. I continued reading there while getting some sun, went back to the beach for a few minutes, then took the 71 bus straight back to Lower Haight (didn't feel like riding and wanted to keep reading my book on the bus).
I lasted about five hours without my iPhone, and it felt... good. During my experiment, the thought that my cell phone was turned off popped into my mind every once in a while, but I brushed the temptation aside. I'm glad I did.
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| Ocean Beach, looking north |
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| Back yard of the "General Store" |
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| This is what many of the houses in Ocean Beach/Outer Sunset look like |
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| Where I ate lunch: the Devil's Teeth Baking Company |
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| Sitting on a sand dune before heading home |
