I’m going to San Francisco for a short stint. These are the never before revelead blog posts about what happens day to day on that trip. If the title didn’t ring a bell, then congratulations: there is still time for you to open your heart to accept Slowdive into your life. Listen.

Trigger warnings: Exercise, sunburn, boring reiteration of one’s day.

There are many ways to start the day off. A way I can strongly recommend is with a cup of coffee and a few jam toasts, maybe some orange juice, all enjoyed on an outside table in the rising sun.

So naturally, I did the complete opposite. I skipped breakfast. Instead I went for a run with a few of my travel partners. We decided on a meeting point and took it from there. There was no plan, except maybe to find a park somewhere where we could run without stopping for cars every twenty seconds or risk becomming road kill. Someone spotted Golden Gate park on the map, and we decided to head there. The hilly terrain almost broke us on the way there, about 2 km, so when we arrived there, together with a rather large group from a runner’s club who had the misfortune of matching our tempo, we thought we should take a small tour around the park, then maybe head back.

However, when we confered, our dear friend Hampus said that his goal was to get to the coast. And since all of us were low on blood sugar and quality sleep, we agreed. It didn’t look far on the map.1

At this point, the sun was high, so we decided it’s time to work on the old tan2 and get our shirts off. Since we figured it wouldn’t be long, we’d be fine, right?

Long story short: people in SF love to talk, ravens are cool animals, the coast was 8 km away and I have better stamina than I thought. We split the group up and decided to meet at the ocean. Me and Jesper picked up the tempo and got to the ocean first. We played with a dog, dipped our feet and realized we weren’t shure if the others would find us. We found a restaurant with a view, the rest of the gang showed up, I ate the best possible breakfast – being super hungry and tired and then eating anything fatty – before we decicided we should go to the Golden Gate bridge. Somehow, we figured we could run there, after already covering 14 kilometres.

So, leg two of the adventure was swimming in the Pacific and walking along the coast up to the Golden Gate (we dropped the idea of running there pretty quick). Meanwhile the sun was getting a lot stronger and burning us hard. Remember, the original idea was to just go for a quick run. This was becoming a proper excursion.

So we got eaten by the sun, but we got to see some beautiful views. Photos are sure to come.

The runners

A photo posted by Rikard Hjort (@lolangest) on

Oh, and we were at a bar that had a band on a boat, and tropical rains indoors. Nothing too fancy.

Band on a boat

A photo posted by Rikard Hjort (@lolangest) on

  1. I have later been informed that is really the whole point of maps: they squeeze rather large distances into smaller ones, so one need to take into account the actual scale of the map, not just “feel” it and hope for the best. 

  2. There was no tan. Not old nor new.