A Blog Along The Lincoln Highway

It’s a beautiful morning in San Francisco. Bright and sunny. No fog.

The folks at the Pacific Heights Inn always have morning coffee and a big box of good donuts in the little office there, so I decide to make that my breakfast. Bob and Glenn go off in search of something more healthy and substantial.

I call the restaurant, and they have my camera. So that is our first stop for the morning. Then Bob and Glenn want to get some souvenirs so we head for Fisherman’s Wharf. Because of some recent reading about the history of the Lincoln Highway, I had decided that it might be cool to get some shots of the Palace of Fine Arts there in San Francisco because it’s the biggest reminder of the glory that was the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition. That exposition was one of the reasons why the founders of the Lincoln Highway worked so hard to get their road ready in 1913. They wanted people to be able to drive from the east coast to San Francisco on a paved, or at least mostly paved, highway.

While the boys go shopping, I make a call to the Exploratorium, the interactive science center that’s in the old Palace now. The public information director there tells me that I’ll have to call the city’s Department of Parks too because they own and maintain the grounds around the Exploratorium, and I’m lucky. Everybody’s willing to bend the rules a wee bit to accommodate my last minute request. And the initials PBS often open many doors that might otherwise be hard to get through.

We find the Palace and it’s a beautiful scene on a gorgeous day. There are lots of kids and people walking around, feeding the birds. We get pictures with all the cameras that we have. Video and stills. The architect of this old set of buildings was Bernard R. Maybeck, and he wanted the whole area to feel like Roman ruins. It’s grand, lots of columns, a big domed rotunda (now covered with scaffolding because it’s being restored), and the building that now houses the Exploratorium.

We go into the science museum to get a few interiors in case we want to explain what’s at the Exposition nowadays, and we’re knocked out. It is totally fun and engaging and full of cool things to play with, to try out, to be amazed by. It would be a fitting end to any trip. The public information woman told me that they’d won an award as Best Museum on Earth or something like that, and we understand. We want to stay and play, but we have miles to go before we sleep.