If you are going to San Francisco,
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you are going to San Francisco,
You're gonna meet some gentle people there

For those who come to San Francisco,
Summertime will be a love-in there
In the streets of San Francisco
Gentle people with flowers in their hair...

So wrote John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas in 1967, for a song recorded by Scott McKenzie, which for some became the anthem of the Summer of Love.

If you decide to go to San Francisco for this year's 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, let me give you a few pointers:

--There's a free celebration concert planned Sept. 2 at Speedway Meadows in Golden Gate Park. Organizers promise "world-class musical acts and entertainment that will represent the spirit and energy of the 1967 Summer of Love," though they have yet to announce any names. More info: 2b1records.com/summeroflove40th.

--Will you meet gentle people with flowers in their hair if you visit Haight-Ashbury this summer? Gentle people, yes. Not many flowers in hair these days. You'll also meet street kids and panhandlers, some meek and glassy-eyed, some strung out, a few aggressively foul-mouthed if you don't give them money. We enjoyed some of the buskers in the Haight, including a couple of free-spirited women in fun/crazy outfits who played wild and funky music on squeeze box and fiddle. We also enjoyed the relative lack of corporate shopping: By and large, shops and restaurants are independent and definitely have their own character.

--The Red Victorian at Haight and Cole streets is a good place to stay, if your mind is open to something well off the corporate hotel track. Be warned: The front entry and lobby are on the care-worn side and could use a good spiffing up. But upstairs, the 18 rooms are attractively decorated with novel themes, and the rooms and shared bathrooms clean and relatively polished. (Some rooms have private baths.) There's a good free breakfast every morning in the lobby. My pick for best decor: the Skylight Room or the Playground Room. At $89 and up (with price breaks for 3 nights and more), you'll be hard pressed to find a better bargain in San Francisco.

--We did visit a head shop in the Haight, just out of curiosity. We didn't stay long. Neither my daughter nor I are into that stuff, and how many blown-glass hash pipes can you look at? (It's like a Chihuly acid trip.) But if you're interested, it's all still there, folks.

But it's a colorful neighborhood, and we enjoyed staying in a neighborhood rather than in the busy city center surrounded by other tourists. This summer, with the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, there might just be a love-in there.

BRIAN J. CANTWELL / THE SEATTLE TIMES

No denying that Haight-Ashbury is a colorful neighborhood.

Hi, this is Brian. Lillian is going to jump in on this conversation off and on, too.

San Francisco is a city of avant garde art and culture, so when Lilli planned this trip, she looked for some of the more unusual experiences we might take part in. A couple with a common, sort of oddball theme came up: (1) A tour through something called the Tactile Dome, in total darkness where only your sense of touch guides you; and (2) a "sound sculpture" experience called Audium, in which an audience sits in a totally dark theater and listens to an audio performance from giant banks of speakers, with no visual cues to distract.

We were going to do both today, on our last full day in San Francisco. Turns out we made it only to the Tactile Dome. We'll tell you about that.

The Tactile Dome was the 1971 brainchild of Dr. August F. Coppola, a professor at Cal State (as well as being the brother of famed director Francis Ford Coppola, and father of actor Nicolas Cage). It is a geodesic dome inside the Exploratorium science museum, in San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts complex.

BRIAN J. CANTWELL / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Lillian Cantwell gets her first touch of the Tactile Dome.

The dome was smaller than we expected. We had to make special reservations, and as we entered a tiny waiting room, the first instructions were to remove our shoes, jackets, loose jewelry, and valuables from our pockets. Oh boy, what were we getting ourselves into?

I'll let my daughter tell you more.

Lillian: We pushed our way through a black curtain and were immediately confronted by total darkness. And punching bags. One of the main premises of the Tactile Dome is the random placement of everyday objects that might look like nothing much, but feel pretty weird when lurched into in complete darkness.

Brian: That might explain why Lilli, who was leading the way, kept uttering, "Ohhh.....ohhhh......uh, ohhhhhh." Not exactly what you want from a fearless leader. Meanwhile, I was having my first-ever claustrophobic panic attack as the ceiling lowered around us and we were crawling in pitch blackness through a creepy, narrow umbilical canal seemingly made of naugahyde.

Lillian: A few of the other things we bumped into and wallowed through were keys, bubble wrap, lots of fake fur, hairbrushes and boots, as well as quite a few other foreign objects I couldn't name. The most unexpected part of our travels inside the dome was probably the...well, the big bouncy thing, for lack of a better phrase. At one point in our trip we found ourselves whooshing down a slide, and instead of landing on solid floor, we were hurled in a little heap on a large section of trampoline-like substance. You know, a big bouncy thing.

BRIAN J. CANTWELL / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Inside the Tactile Dome. Or was this Audium? No, we didn't get there... but they say it looks the same.

Brian: Yes, that was the first slide we came to. Not realizing what was coming, Lilli went down it head first. The narration for that part of our adventure was something along the line of, "Ohhh.....oh dear.....AAAGHH!"

Lilli again: As for the creepiest part of our journey, I have to admit that for me personally it was undoubtedly the stuffed animal chamber. Sure, they look cute and cuddly in broad daylight, but you try scrabbling for purchase in a heap of teddy bears in the dark and walking away without emotional scarring. It's hard.

Brian: Done with that, we headed for Chinatown for a dim sum lunch at The Potsticker restaurant across from Tin How Temple. By the time we got back to our hotel it was 3 p.m., we were pooped, and we realized Lillian still has about 50 long pages of her European History textbook to finish reading by Monday. (Even Spring Break has homework.)

We fly home in the morning, and there's packing to do. So we're bagging our plans for Audium, as intriguing as it sounds. Sometimes, the best-laid plans have to wait for the next trip.

No worries. We've had a great week, with lots of new experiences. And maybe we'll have time to dance down Haight Street for a final dinner at Cha Cha Cha. That would cap the week nicely.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The Palace of Fine Arts is called a palace for a reason. Look at those Corinthian columns.

1. The Yerba Buena Gardens: In spite of the name, the Yerba Buena Gardens bore an amazing resemblance to a blobby concrete building complex. Appearances aside, the "Gardens" housed a bowling alley, a skating rink, a large playground, and a widely publicized "Zeum" (I am still unsure of what this is, but there were lots of signs for it, so it must have been pretty cool). We did not venture very far into the complex, but our peering from afar led us to the conclusion that the people inside Were Having Fun.

2. A convoluted succession of buses and confused wandering left us somewhat unsure of our exact location. This made the sudden appearance of the Palace of Fine Arts all the more amazing. I had never seen this landmark before, nor even heard of its existence, and thus its abrupt materialization out of nowhere left me gasping. In case you are unaware of the gasp-worthiness of the Palace of Fine Arts, let me fill you in:

(A) The first clue is the word "Palace" in its title. Definitely palatial in size, this immense dome is supported by columns which can best be described by my parental unit's statement when he saw them: "Whoa. Are those Corinthians or are those Corinthians?"

(B) Secondly -- well, actually I said everything I intended to already. I just thought my description would look ritzier if I used (A) and (B). Sorry.

Robert Durell/Los Angeles Times

City Lights, a North Beach book shop co-founded in 1953 by poet/painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti, has long ties to the beat generation and its poets and writers.

3. Because a trip to San Francisco wouldn't be complete without a nod to the city's illustrious beatnik past, we stuck our heads into the City Lights book store. My father bought (what else?) Jack Kerouac's famous "On the Road." I purchased Christopher Moore's book, "A Dirty Job," set in San Francisco, which I have since banned myself from reading on public transit, as it causes me to emit unattractive snorts and high-pitched giggles.

4. We concluded our wanderings huddled in a cafe at Crissy Field with a great view of Golden Gate Bridge, sheltering from the wind and sun. Having trekked up and down the waterfront a few more times than was quite necessary for human happiness, I was past caring whether or not my wind-ravaged hair and sun-pummeled face made me look like a complete dinkus. I sat back in my chair and watched a boy across the street using his coat as a sail to propel him on his skateboard. He was moving pretty fast. I smiled, rejoicing in the fact that, unlike that skateboarder, I was inside, out of the wind, and preparing to consume a cup of steaming hot tea and half a chocolate chip cookie. Life was good.

The weather forecast said cool and windy, so we bagged our plan to bike across the Golden Gate. (If it's windy at Union Square, it's likely blowing a gale at the bridge, and bicycling backward isn't good for one's self-image.)

Instead we set out at my suggestion to have a picnic near the beach at the Presidio, where we'd get a good view of the famous bridge.

We got off the Route 30 bus in the Marina District and there, a block away, was the amazing dome of the Palace of Fine Arts, originally built in 1915 for the Panama-Pacific Exposition and restored in the 1960s. It's one of San Francisco's most impressively grandiose public monuments.

I hadn't told Lillian we'd be passing it, and she hadn't read about it in her research for the trip. Once spied, though, we could no more dismiss it and walk away than decide not to breathe for the rest of the day. And the massive dome and its ornate Corinthian columns so enchanted Lilli, she immediately asked, "Oh, can we have our picnic here?" She pointed to a bench in the lovely sunshine by the dome's fountain-dappled reflecting pond, with the magnificent structure just a few seagull-flaps away.

I could no more say "no" than I could turn into Snidely Whiplash.

So we pulled out our loaf of artisan walnut bread from the Haight Street Market, smeared it with Laughing Cow cheese, peeled a sweet tangelo and enjoyed what was quite possibly the best picnic ever.

Travel lesson for the day: Value spontaneity.

We did still walk through Crissy Field, the beachfront area of the Presidio where gulls hunker down on sandbars and snowy egrets wade in restored tidepools surrounded by golden poppies, great honking bushes of blue lupine and, yes, blazing red spikes of Indian paintbrush (though what it's doing here instead of on Mount Rainier, I don't quite understand). We enjoyed the glorious panorama of shadowed hills, the eye-pleasing and structurally breathtaking bridge, white-capped green water, windsurfers, sailboats and scuttling harbor-tour craft.

In case you don't get my drift, it's a place well worth a visit.

Brian J. Cantwell/The Seattle Times

Restored dunes and tidelands at the Presidio's Crissy Field offer gull's-eye views of the Golden Gate.

It strikes me that San Francisco is a city of glimpses.

On our walk this morning, the towers of the Bay Bridge suddenly arose over the roofs of a line of auto repair shops on Folsom Street, brightening the neighborhood in a manner completely unexpected.

The top of the magnificent dome of the Palace of Fine Arts had a way this afternoon of poking up from behind other buildings around the Presidio to give the impression that a gigantic bald man was crouching just out of sight.

Around the neighborhoods, little parks and green spaces appear in the least expected places, often at the top of improbably pointy peaks, in spots that could easily be crowded with gazillion-dollar homes.

And yesterday, Coit Tower surprised me as I was taking a photo by appearing to grow out of the chimney of a little bungalow along the disarmingly charming Filbert Steps, which climb through semi-tropical gardens.

This was the site of an equally pleasing overheard conversation: Resting on a bench among a tangle of sweet jasmine at the edge of the steps, we watched a resident come out and recount to a companion the challenges of moving a sofa into one of the wonderful hill-clinging houses reached only by steps from streets far above and below. "You know, the movers were almost all the way up here when I said, 'Wait, it would have been a lot shorter to come down from above!' "

I didn't hear whether they threw the sofa at her or just left it there. It wasn't to be seen, so I guess it got into the house.

Today we ascended the steps leading to Coit Tower with a definite purpose in mind: We were going parrot hunting.

When I say "hunting" I don't mean we intended to butcher and feast upon the brightly colored birds; we were simply seeking them in the interest of sightseeing. Roughly three years back I dragged my family along to see the documentary "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill." The movie is centered on the improbable flock of cherry-headed conures that makes its home at the top of Telegraph Hill. No one is quite sure how the birds arrived there, though there are many theories. The most popular is that the birds are escapees from pet shops and private homes all over the city who have heard of a meeting place in the trees next to Coit Tower by word of beak, and have made their way to this spot. Ever since seeing the movie it has been a soft little dream of mine to see the parrots in question. Thus it was with firm resolve that we trudged up the wind-buffeted stairs to Coit Tower.

Coit Tower in and of itself is worth a visit. A 180-foot structure resembling a fireman's hose (complete with nozzle-like top), it is situated at the summit of Telegraph Hill, and lends an excellent view of the city. My parental unit and I did not actually venture to the top of the tower; a fee was required, and after releasing the majority of our spare change to the buskers of Chinatown we were feeling the need for thrift. However, the mere act of standing at the various viewpoints next to the tower provided us with much more than our prescribed daily dosage of awe-inspiring panoramic scenery.

BRIAN J. CANTWELL / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Lillian Cantwell pauses to watch for parrots along the Filbert Steps below Coit Tower.

Having drunk in the view sufficiently, my father and I marched off in hot pursuit of our goal. Surely the parrots lurked just beyond the next stand of trees! Listen! What's that? Certainly that chittering could be nothing less than a full flock! And look up! Is that a parrot? Wheeling majestically, soaring above the treetops like a ---

No, never mind, that's just a pigeon. Sorry for the interruption, folks. Carry on.

We finally caught a brief glimpse of the parrots. We had unhappily resigned ourselves to a pitiful and parrotless existence when a burst of squawking caused our heads to snap up. We looked up just in time. A group of five or six flamboyantly green and red avians zoomed above us, disappearing as quickly as they had arrived. Nonetheless, I was satisfied. I had met my admittedly unlikely goal: I had found wild parrots in the midst of urban San Francisco. With unreasonably wide smiles, my father and I skipped back down the steps.

Wandering the back alleys of Chinatown is the way to discover the real treats of this city within a city. Four developed alleys between Grant Avenue and Stockton Street intersect Washington Street within half a block of each other.

That's where we found the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory ("since Aug. 5, 1962"). We'd read that you could see the cookies being made, and we were looking for a big, uh, factory, maybe with glass windows through which we could watch white-coated technicians operating intricate machinery.

Brian J. Cantwell/The Seattle Times

A cookie-maker turns out fortune cookies at Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory in San Francisco's Chinatown.

When we finally stumbled into tiny Ross Alley we almost walked right by the place. This was no large manufacturing plant. A narrow opening the width of a rollup door led into a small workspace where four women toiled, a few feet from the entry, busily tucking fortunes into cookies and plucking them from heated cookie presses.

There were no glass windows, no tour guide. A gentlemen in a well-worn gray suit looked up and waved us in, quickly offering us free samples of the golden toasted cookies.

Shelves at our elbow displayed the various cookies baked there, and we chose a mix of regular and chocolate-flavored fortune cookies ($4 for a big bag). We watched for a minute to see how they were made, then smiled and took our leave.

Brian J. Cantwell/The Seattle Times

The barber at Jun Yu's Barber Shop in San Francisco's Chinatown plays his erhu for passersby.

The back alleys are fun to wander because they're not full of tourist shops selling the usual wooden snakes and crickets-in-a-box. We saw an interesting variety of tiny businesses -- florists, a print shop, beauty parlors -- catering to Chinatown locals. As we stepped outside the cookie factory, the barber from Jun Yu's Barber Shop next door was taking a break from hair cutting to entertain passersby with music from his two-stringed erhu, a Chinese musical instrument played like a cello. The music was lilting and pleasant; one passage clearly resembled a Chinese version of "Amazing Grace."

One of Lilli's best guidebook discoveries was our last stop in Chinatown: Tin How Temple, dedicated to the Queen of the Heavens and protector of seafarers and visitors. Founded in 1852, it's said to be the longest operating Chinese temple in the United States.

It's not big inside or fancy outside, actually occupying the top floor of a narrow balconied building off quiet Waverly Place. We zigzagged up three flights of wooden stairs to emerge into the temple room, whose ceiling was festooned with red and gold lanterns. Incense fogged the air, and gifts of fresh oranges decorated an intricately carved altar in front of a wooden statue of the heavenly queen.

Two quiet elderly women presided over the temple. As I put a donation into a box, I looked questioningly at them for permission to take one of the folded fabric talismen, stamped with Chinese characters, which hung on strings next to the donation box. One of the women smiled, nodded vigorously and said, "For good luck!" Lilli and I each placed one around our necks.

We paid a dollar for some incense, lit a stick and left it on the altar. Then we clumped down the stairs and headed for Telegraph Hill, feeling lucky.

BRIAN J. CANTWELL / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Izu Interlandi, guide on the Haight-Ashbury Flower Power Walking Tour, stands by the house where the Grateful Dead once lived and recalls the day in 1995 when Jerry Garcia died. Fans created an altar on the home's front porch.

Sure, the Grateful Dead house was interesting: It was tall, kind of lavender, and fancy in the usual style of San Francisco's amazing supply of Victorian and Edwardian homes. And it was right across the street from the Hell's Angels' former digs, another gorgeous Victorian (no longer Angel-owned, and not very gorgeous when it was, so we heard).

But what really got to me on our Haight-Ashbury Flower Power Walking Tour this morning was the mural on the side of the Hamilton Methodist Church on Belvedere Street.

It was one of those artworks that is a real statement of its age and place, like Grant Wood's "American Gothic," say, or maybe an Andy Warhol painting. Along with the faces of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and (we're not sure why) Harry Truman, were (even more curiously) the unmistakable, earnest likenesses of Linc, Pete and Julie, the three stars of "The Mod Squad" TV show (1968-73).

Next to them, in this happy, hippie world painted by muralist Charles Lobdell in the 1970s, a circle of winsome and peaceful people danced hand in hand in a circle around a mighty spreading oak tree.

But wait. Why's the Mod Squad there? Weren't those guys, uh, narcs? Yes, admittedly, they were narcs with a heart -- and they knew how to wear their bell-bottoms -- but why are they memorialized in a mural in the middle of hippie-dippy Haight-Ashbury? Maybe it's a statement of how much pop there is in the culture here.

We learned a lot, though, in a 2 1/2 hour walk around the Haight with a guide who's been here long enough to know the neighbors (including being on a first-name basis with Jerry Garcia when he was alive).

"Mommy and Daddy brought me out here to hippie-fy me during the Summer of Love because they thought I was too conservative, and boy did they regret it," said Izu Interlandi, our 53-year-old guide, who was 14 at the time, and who moved to the Haight permanently in 1971.

In her tie-dyed skirt and long black hair, she gabbed and laughed non-stop as we wandered the district.

Standing between the Grateful Dead house and the Hell's Angels house, she told us some insider stories.

"A lady from Long Island bought the Hell's Angels house in 1996 and she made it beautiful -- it was a dump when the Angels had it. And every Thanksgiving, hundreds of Hell's Angels still ride by to honor this house and she comes out to greet them in full black leather. Then they go down to eat together at the People's Cafe on Haight Street."

When Garcia, the Grateful Dead band leader, died in 1995, hundreds of "Deadhead" fans showed up at the house at 710 Ashbury. A couple who have owned the house since 1980 were respectful of Garcia's memory, Interlandi said.

"People came and made an altar up the steps of the house, with candles, crystals and flowers, and the owners carefully walked around everything when they came and went."

We saw where Country Joe shared a place with Janis Joplin; met an old hippie named Waterfall, who changed his name and moved here from New Jersey after Woodstock changed his life; and saw a photo exhibit in a private Psychedelic Museum devoted largely, it seemed, to the San Francisco rock stars who died by age 27 from drugs, alcohol or psychoses.

And at the end of the tour, we all got big, sincerely sweet hugs from our guide. That's the Haight.

Tomorrow, something completely different: We visit Chinatown.

Mmm. I'm completely and utterly happy. Life is perfect, and nothing can be wrong right now. I think I may have found the love of my life.

This isn't a person I'm talking about. Oh no, I speak of Cha Cha Cha, the Cuban restaurant at Haight and Shrader where mon Pere and I ate lunch today. Besides enjoying Cha Cha Cha's fun decor (there were several interesting altars to various deities), I could quite literally eat there for the rest of my life and be perfectly satisfied. The lighter-than-air calimari, the heavenly garlic shrimp, the fried plantains fit for the gods! Mmm...

Sorry about that. I get a little overenthusiastic in regards to food sometimes. Moving on now...

A few steps down Haight Street, we popped our noses into Amoeba Music, and eventually managed to pry ourselves back out. Apparently the space now crammed with CDs, LPs, tapes and more used to house a bowling alley, and it was certainly big enough. One staff member told us that a rough estimate would tally about 30,000 various musical items. After due consideration I settled on Franz Ferdinand and R.E.M., while my father opted for a Grateful Dead CD.

We also stopped in at Positively Haight Street and Haight-Ashbury T-Shirts in order to purchase the tie-dye T-shirts requisite to the San Francisco tourist's closet. I have now obtained a neon pink, green, and orange tribute to Haight-Ashbury of my very own, and the hunt for a similar item for my parental unit shall continue tomorrow!

Brian J. Cantwell/The Seattle Times

Positively Haight Street specializes in tie-dye delights.

This just in: There's no Gap store at the corner of Haight and Ashbury anymore.

We found that most guidebooks to San Francisco bemoaned the longstanding presence of America's great generic corporate clothier at the fabled corner as proof of the Haight's fall from hippie grace.

But shop windows once crowded with gray hoodies and khaki cargo shorts are now papered over. Gap moved out a couple months ago, a local told us. The only corporate name remaining at the crossroads of hipdom is Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream. And at least they have Free Cone Day.

Haight-Ashbury's Red Victorian bills itself as a peace center, not just a B-and-B. I've noticed something inside every bathroom. They're shared, and each has a different decor theme, so there's incentive to try new ones (the "Love Bathroom," with "Love, Love, Love" in Peter Max-like supergraphics, or the "Infinity Bathroom," with LOTS of mirrors)... Anyway, in every bathroom, there's a sign promoting "Breakfast Conversations at the Red Victorian":

"Meet other travelers, social innovators, teachers, students, spiritual, environmental and educational activists, and ordinary people from everywhere, by engaging in breakfast conversations and pooling knowledge and experience and love. Talk about what you are doing and learn what others are doing to co-create a more loving planet."

Definitely not what you get at the Super 8. And a, uh, heady order for the breakfast hour, it occurred to me.

Maybe too heady. This morning, a good crowd of fellow travelers and innovators lined up in the hotel dining lobby for sliced cantaloupe, fresh grapefruit and toasted bagels. There were young and old, some who sounded like New Yorkers, some with a British lilt to their speech.

And every one of us took our knowledge and experience and love to separate tables, leaving the big round "Conversation Table" (it had a sign) without a soul.

We just hadn't had our coffee yet. Maybe tomorrow we'll feel like co-creating.

After an intricate combination of planes, trains and city buses, my father and I arrived at the Red Victorian. The hotel is run by a woman named Sami Sunchild, and sports its very own Gallery of Meditative Art. Every room has a different theme; ours is the "Playground Room", commemorating the first public playground in the U.S., in Golden Gate Park. The decor features painted balloons and pictures of carrousel animals in addition to various stuffed beings (Humpty Dumpty, Snoopy, a dragon, and several four-foot long crayons, to name a few). After some deliberation, I've decided to describe the room as festive, though I must admit I find the Canadian Mountie doll hanging at eye level next to my bed to be a tad alarming!

BRIAN J. CANTWELL / THE SEATTLE TIMES

The Red Victorian is Haight-Ashbury's lodging with a peace-and-love theme.

We can't call it the Summer of Love, exactly, since this is April. But when I asked my 15-year-old daughter, Lillian, where she wanted to go on our annual father-daughter trip for this year, San Francisco popped right up. The City by the Bay has a history of being a young person's town -- dancing in the streets, and all that -- so this year she planned the trip. She studied the guidebooks and plotted our itinerary.

One thing that quickly arose was this interesting fact: San Francisco's "Summer of Love" -- the summer of 1967 when the Haight-Ashbury district was the sort of Magic Vortex of flower power and hippiedom -- turns 40 this year. Not just over the hill -- that was age 30, if I recall -- but downright next to dead (by the standards of a 1967 Jefferson Airplane fan, anyway).

So Lilli, who would have led flower power parades and poked daisies into rifle barrels with the best of them if her DNA had been a few decades younger, had me book us into an old hippie hotel in the Haight. That's right, the Red Vic, as it's affectionately known.

JOHN LOK / THE SEATTLE TIMES

My 15-year-old daughter, Lillian, planned the trip.

When I say it's an old hippie hotel, I mean it in the sense of both being an old hotel -- circa 1904 -- and a place that catered to lots of hippies in the '60s. Plus it attracts old hippies today.

The hotel's rooms have themes -- including the "Summer of Love" room. Lilli chose ours -- the Playground Room. (But she can tell you more about that.)

So we've got our base for the week, in an interesting neighborhood with a colorful history, far from most tourist hotels. We plan to see the Grateful Dead house, poke around head shops, watch fortune cookies being made in Chinatown, hear a "sound sculpture" concert in a pitch-dark theater, bike across the Golden Gate, and have squawking contests with the parrots of Telegraph Hill. Come along for the ride!