A friend just told me about his trip to San Francisco. He mentioned that he went over the Golden Gate bridge twice and this reminded me of my first trip to SF.

Many many years ago I had been somewhere at the beach north of Santa Monica to enjoy the sunset. The night before I had had a conversation with my then room mate regarding spontaneous and unplanned actions, and so, when it was time to head back from the beach I remembered that conversation and just went the other way…

… and was in SF at one am. Had some food at a Dennis – Always Open, you know – talked to a Texan, was very proud that I understood what he said and then drove over the golden gate bridge before dawn, looked over the bay from Sausalito, drove once more over the bridge during sunrise and headed back to LA.

Was an interesting trip back because my good old ’79 Ford LTD Station Wagon (white) started to make trouble, used a lot of gas and I finally found some little leak of fuel at the gas pump. looked like I had lost a little screw there and so I just put a little plug in there and got home OK.

Found out the day after that I had been very lucky – there was no screw missing, but instead it was a safety hole to drain the gas in case the membrane of the gas pump was broken. By plugging that whole I had flooded the crank case with gas – oops! Could have easily blown up the whole engine – but then again, guess I had decided not to do that, didn’t I?

Funny how these little, insignificant events can come alive again.