Little Fish in a Big Sea

In case you read my farewell to 2012, let me update you on what ACTUALLY happened, because, you know, fireworks over the Golden Gate Bridge just sounded too good to be true, right?

It was actually fireworks over the Bay Bridge.

But settle your jealous bones. When you are as sheltered as myself and my mister, you tend to feel slightly out of place with 200,000 San Franciscans (is that what you call them?) on your heels. So here’s the story of how our night went down.

A very kind shuttle driver informed us that we were absolutely nuts if we thought driving into San Fran on New Year’s Eve was even close to a good idea, so he taught us about the BART, the Bay Area something something… the subway/train/whatever. So we did that, and that was an adventure in itself. It should be easy enough for two adults, you know, to figure out how to get 10 miles from our hotel to the city. So we finally get on the BART, 45 minutes later than we had planned, because everyone else in San Fran had the same idea. It wasn’t too difficult, except for the fact that we didn’t know what stop was which, and for about 35 minutes we assumed that we were going to end up in downtown Oakland after dark… NO thank you. I hate the Raiders, so I just assume that I’d hate Oakland an equal amount.

After we finally get off, stupid iPhone Mapquest takes us around the block twice, only to end up at the BART station again.  Thanks MQ, you suck. It’s dark and chilly and the roads are crowded and two miles later, we find the Ferry Building, which sits just off to the left of the Bay Bridge. A pretty view – but I insist to the mister that I read online, PIER 41 is the place to hear the music that is synced to the fireworks, so we walk. And we walk. And we walk some more. A nice man on a bicycle taxi of some sort tells us that Pier 41 is “only about a mile” from our current location, and even though we’d already walked about 3 (in Ugg boots, by the way), we continue. And it gets chillier. And I have to pee (what the hell is new, right friends?) and there are a million people (maybe a thousand, whatever) surrounding me. We see a cute place to maybe stop and get drinks, but continue on to “make sure we get a good view.”

So we walk and walk and walk, like I mentioned, and our feet hurt, and we FINALLY end up at 41, and there are only about ten people there. Well that’s confusing, since this is the prime location to see the fireworks according to the ‘net. So we sit, and we start to freeze from that oh-so-fresh ocean breeze at 10:45pm, and I start to Google, and my cheeks blush, and I’m afraid to tell my husband that I have just diagnosed myself with dyslexia – Pier 41 and Pier 14 are two totally different locations, it turns out. And in the moment I realized I miscalculated by about 1.5 miles, all I want to do is be in my bed, or the hotel bed, or really anywhere but Pier 41. So we walk again. And it starts to feel much more “city-ish” as a ridiculous amount of police and fire and ambulance lights go flying by us, down the middle of two lanes and almost running over a handful of drunken pedestrians. And as we get closer, I get a little more scared. That “cute little place to get a drink” I mentioned earlier is now surrounded with CAUTION tape and those hundred police/fire/ambulance lights we just passed. Policemen are screaming at people and I suddenly feel like San Francisco is not so great after all.

We hurry down the road and finally end up at Pier 9, standing on the sidewalk freezing our booties off as we wait for the stupid fireworks to start. We’re both grumpy and tired and frozen solid and there are too many people, and oh yeah – we are SO not city people. But I do have to say, this was our first New Year’s Eve together, and the fireworks start, and I got my midnight kiss, and we had a pretty great view – fireworks right over the BAY Bridge (not the GG Bridge like I insisted in my ADIOS 2012 post… I suck).

And we walk back another 2 miles to the BART station down dark allies and past drunken chicks hanging out of car windows, screaming a random assortment of New Year’s cheers. And I’m pretty sure I saw some hookers, so that was new.

And we end up back at our hotel two hours past midnight, and we are thankful that we didn’t fall asleep on the BART, because that was a very realistic possibility.

And the next morning, I see on the news that a man was shot at the Pier 23 restaurant (that “cute little place to get drinks” we almost went to and later saw all the emergency crews at) and they couldn’t find the gunman in the mass amount of people on the Embarcadero (you know, exactly where we were chillin’ all night)…

Hi I’m Kaila and I hate the city.

 Our view from the sidewalk.

This was us in our warm, comfy, safe hotel room - if we had only known what we were getting ourselves into...