San Francisco Trip Recap, Friday 10/20/2006, Part 3

Before we left for our trip, I made a short list of paper stores I was hoping to visit, complete with addresses, phone numbers and store hours. In our room, the hotel provided an 8 1/2 x 11" map of San Francisco and Braman and I used the addresses from my list to mark the locations on the map. There were five stores that were in fairly close proximity to the Exploratorium.

We started out walking and visited Books, Inc. and Paper Source on Chestnut Street and Union Street Papery on Union Street.

I bought one card in Books, Inc. plus some postcards to send, nothing in Paper Source (this was mostly a curiousity stop to see if this store was much like the ones in Boston and Cambridge and it was), and a bunch of cards in Union Store Papery. I might have gotten more but it is a small store and Braman was trying to entertain Nora outside while I shopped and she got sick of this quickly and came tottering in by herself. Once I was holding her my shopping time was pretty limited.

Larsson had fallen asleep shortly after Books, Inc., and we were pushing him in the stroller while we carried Nora or let her walk. We were all tired after this walking and the next two stores were near each other but about 9 blocks away from where we were in a neighborhood called Russian Hill. They are not kidding about the hill so we took the bus there to visit Russian Hill Bookstore and Polk A Dot Stationers.

On our last trip to San Francisco, we had visited both of these stores and had great success at each so I was looking forward to going to them again. The stop at Russian Hill Bookstore did not disappoint and I found a bunch of great cards, including pirate cards for Larsson's next birthday and several cards with violins on them should we ever need to send personal correspondence to Larsson's violin teacher.

Sadly, although I thought I had all the information I needed, I should have called ahead to verify my facts since we discovered, after walking uphill to find it, that Polk A Dot Stationers had gone out of business. This was especially sad since the last time we were there I had found some interesting cards that I haven't seen anywhere else and they were cheap, too, for letterpress cards.

But I didn't mind quite as much as I could have since by then my left foot was really bothering me and quite numb from all the walking around. We gratefully got back on the bus which left us off quite close to our hotel.

With all my blathering about our day, you might have forgotten the purpose of our trip so I will now say that we arrived back in Union Square in time for me to pick up my race packet at Niketown.

Nike, naturally, is the host of the Nike Women's Marathon, and Niketown, a 7-story store on the corner of Post and Stockton streets in Union Square was making a big deal about the race. We were almost instantly deafened by the dj music as we entered the store. They had redone the store directory for the weekend so I could tell that packet pick-up was on the 4th floor, the Espresso Cart and Runner's General Store (stocked with things like GU and BodyGlide) were on the 5th floor and Marathon merchandise and the Heat Press station were on the 3rd floor.

Since we had the stroller, we took the elevator to the 4th floor. I picked up my bag and my number (but not my t-shirt which you only get when you finish), had my chip activated and we left. There were hordes of women in that store intent on purchasing a lot of Nike stuff and it was too crowded and loud, and we were too tired, to look around. But it was exciting to finally have my number and official race stuff in hand and I felt like I was actually going to run a marathon in two days.

We walked back down the hill later to have dinner again at Westfield Centre and then took the cable car back up to our hotel. Thank goodness it was a short ride because it turned out that Nora hated cable cars. I thought she would enjoy looking out at where we were going but instead she screammed, "No! No!" as we jerkily climbed our way up the hill. Larsson had a good time, though, but we didn't try cable cars again on our trip.

I iced my foot and my knee that night and hoped that neither of them would be a problem on race day.