Asleep on the KX

Nathan & I made a trip up to the City last night. I have a gut feeling for how long a train trip he finds fun, and RWC->SF is a little longer than that, so we "zipped" up to Hillsdale. Actually we hit traffic. Hillsdale Blvd itself was clogged enough that when the station was in sight, we just parked (it's kind of surprising you can park on Hillsdale, but it is actually a residential street, albeit a pretty sucky one).

There was some trouble on the line last night but the upshot was that we got on a train that should have passed Hillsdale before we got there, but it was an express too, so whatevs. It was insanely crowded though. CalTrain staff at SF station could have done a better job clearing people impatiently waiting to get on a train out of the way of people trying to get off, though.

King St, the street that goes from the station to the bay via the Ballpark, has a series of plaques memorializing the the language of San Francisco's original Ohlone inhabitants via select vocabulary items. Here is Nate on the plaque for shinniishmin, "boy":

There's a 9/11 memorial in front of the Giants Stadium.

South Beach Park is just past the baseball stadium, and has a small but cool playground. It has an up-and-downy spiral thing that Nathan likes to walk on:

You can see it better from the air!

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It also has an old fashioned kid-power merry-go-round.

We made our way downtown on the N, and alighted at Embarcadero. They've put up some amusing posters since I was last down there:

We rode F line a stop or two. It was a short ride, but Nathan's first. He was looking a bit tired by this point!

Bye-bye trolley!

We got of at 1st St, and went to the former Transbay terminal, future HSR station site, and got on a SamTrans KX bus back to Hillsdale (the stop was right where we'd left the car). Nathan was pretty much instantly asleep. So were about half the other passengers.

The KX takes the freeway, so in the late evening, at least, it gets you back to the peninsula pretty fast. It is a good answer to the perpetual problem that if you take CalTrain for an evening trip to San Francisco, it's tricky to take Muni back to the station without either allowing gobs of extra time or running the risk of a just-less-than-an-hour wait for a train if you miss the one you want. The KX also runs a ways down Mission so you can get on at more convenient/nicer locations than the transbay terminal, in front of the Metreon for example.