| I had a day in the Bay Area, so I planned to drive up to San Francisco for a bit. |
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| It's a shame that San Francisco is populated by crazy people. It is a beautiful city. Well that is if you don't look at the scourge of homelessness there. |
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| Eighteen years earlier I went to San Francisco and saw much more of the city, including the Castro district. |
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| *DUPLICATE PHOTO WARNING* On that trip, one early morning I ate breakfast at a little gay diner called Orphan Andy's. It is still there and run by the same guy. I had breakfast there again. |
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| In case you don't know, the Castro was one of the first gay neighborhoods in the country. It seems strange that there are gay neighborhoods, but maybe they feel like there is safety in numbers. |
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| Rainbow crosswalks, of course. |
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| Harvey Milk and Scott Smith opened a
camera store here back in 1973. From the apartment above, Milk first
ran for public office in 1974. He was elected to the San Francisco
Board of Supervisors in 1977. Three weeks after the election, he and
mayor George Moscone were assassinated at City Hall. I know there is a movie with Sean Penn called Milk, but I've never seen it. |
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| You know, the gay people can be a bit cheeky with names of things. Walking up and down Castro Street I saw some. There was an Italian restaurant called Sausage Factory, a hamburger joint called Hamburger Mary's, a nail salon called Hand Job and an adult store called Rock Hard. |
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| I can think of about a million things I would want to do before going to a drag brunch. |
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| On the drive from Castro I went through a little bit of the Haight-Ashbury district. Didn't stop there though. I walked through on my last San Francisco trip. |
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| The Presidio Avenue entrance to The Presidio. I didn't get to The Presidio on my trip in 2004 except for Fort Point for a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. |
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 The Presidio of San Francisco had been a military installation since the Spanish founded it is 1776. |
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| The San Francisco National Cemetery is located there. |
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| I knew that a section of the music video that was created for the George Harrison classic "What Is Life" was shot in a military cemetery in San Francisco, but I didn't know until I looked it up online that it was shot here. If you have not seen the video, you must. It is absolutely charming. |
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 *DUPLICATE PHOTO WARNING* Can't go to the city by the bay without a photo of the big orange bridge they have there. |
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| The purpose of the trip up to San Francisco for the day, apart from a gay breakfast, was to visit the Walt Disney Family Museum, located in one of the old Montgomery Street Barracks. They were the first brick barracks built at The Presidio in the late 19th century. |
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| The special Academy Special Award Oscar (and seven little ones) presented to Walt Disney for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. |
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| The original furnishings from Walt's apartment over the Fire Station at Disneyland. |
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| His old man's fiddle. |
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| Having been long interested in Walt Disney (a biography was one of the first books I ever read for pleasure), I knew a lot of stuff that was covered by the museum. For example, I knew that he drove a Red Cross ambulance in France right after the end of World War I. This is obviously not that ambulance. |
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| Some of Walt's stuff from his days in France. |
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| This is a photo of a photo. It is of the McConahy Building in Kansas City where his Laugh-O-Grams studio was on the second floor. I have been to this building. It is still standing but in need of refurbishment. |
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| Hooray for, well this place. It may be a terrible place now, but way back when it was a place of...oh let's face it. It's probably always been a place of sleaze and debauchery. |
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| This is a copy of a letter from Walt Disney to old friend and animation partner Ub Iwerks, inviting him to come out to Hollywood and join his studio staff in 1924. |
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| A wall full of Iwerks' drawings for Steamboat Willie. |
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