Archives: Stories

  • Walking the San Francisco Crosstown Trail

    Walking the

    San Francisco Crosstown Trail

    By Felix Arntz           December 10, 2020

    The San Francisco Crosstown Trail stretches 17 miles (>27 km) from southeast to northwest.

    On December 5th, my girlfriend and I took on the challenge to complete it.

    CANDLESTICK POINT

    We started at 7am to watch the sunrise over the Bay, at the southeast end of San Francisco.

    Arriving for the sunrise was the perfect start of the trip. And also for other reasons perfectly timed, as it would turn out later.

    EXPLORING

    NEW DISTRICTS

    Both of us had never been to these very southern parts of San Francisco before, so there was a lot to discover – worth exploring!

    LITTLE HOLLYWOOD

    After only a few minutes we arrived in the first residential area, right in front of Bayview Park. The trail didn’t actually lead us to enjoy the views from there, but we added it to our list.

    COFFEE BREAK #1

    We stopped at Mission Blue for a quick coffee to go. A super-cute spot. Definitely felt like outside of San Francisco. The staff was incredibly friendly – also they were wondering whether we were Brazilian.

    The beautiful coffee spot was even selling Crosstown Trail shirts!

    VISITACION VALLEY

    This was our first time in this district. We wandered through the beautiful gardens with its winding paths – almost like a little Lombard Street for pedestrians.

    JOHN McLAREN PARK

    This wonderful spot offered some great views of almost 360 degrees. By now, the sun was already shining high above the horizon.

    My girlfriend thought it would be fun to climb this tree close by.

    We were soon able to spot our first familiar views from afar: Bernal Heights (left) and Downtown (right).

    THE
    PHILOSOPHER’S WAY

    BERNAL HEIGHTS

    The trail didn’t lead us to Bernal Heights Park (one of my favorite spots), but we still walked the neighborhood after crossing FWY 280 via the St. Mary’s Park Footbridge.

    GLEN PARK

    Glen Park made a great first impression as cute neighborhood – including these small houses on Bosworth Street which reminded us of the Painted Ladies.

    What a perfect coincidence, La Corneta Taqueria which I had bookmarked months ago was right on our path. So we stopped there for a late breakfast – or early lunch. Also: first third of the trip completed!

    TACOS!

    DIAMOND HEIGHTS

    One of the longest plain nature trail segments as part of the Crosstown Trail was Glen Canyon Park, which felt like we were not in a city.

    GLEN CANYON PARK

    MIDTOWN TERRACE

    Score! Reaching the Midtown Terrace area and Panorama Drive meant reaching the first area that one of us had been to before. Easy to justify, with all the views.

    SUTRO TOWER

    From Panorama Drive we got a good view on Sutro Tower looming over Twin Peaks (which has nothing to do with the TV show of the same name).

    STAIRS

    GOLDEN GATE HEIGHTS

    Overall the second third of the trip was much more challenging than the first – lots of elevation changes. Golden Gate Heights was the tip of the iceberg (literally).

    MORE

    STAIRS

    The stairs were brutal.

    DOWN

    STAIRS

    Of course we didn’t walk those – would have been too easy.

    First view of the ocean!

    EVEN MORE

    STAIRS

    But this time they were leading up to the highlight of the trip.

    GRANDVIEW PARK

    While the day had become cloudy, the views from Grandview Park ended up being the highlight of the walk, covering everything from downtown over Golden Gate Park to Ocean Beach.

    While enjoying the incredible views, we decided to take another selfie. After those exhausting stairs and hills, Grandview Park was all worth it. Now, we were getting close to completing two thirds of the trip.

    COFFEE BREAK #2

    Right before reaching Golden Gate Park, we stopped for another coffee break at a place called The Game Parlour, a hip cafe that would usually offer boardgames. We’ll come back after the pandemic.

    GOLDEN GATE PARK

    Both of us regularly walk or run through different areas of Golden Gate Park (which, if you didn’t know, is bigger than Central Park in New York). 

    We were now really reaching more familiar areas of the city.

    PRESIDIO

    The Presidio has always been one of my favorite and most visited areas – whether for a run or on my way to Baker Beach. The Crosstown Trail led us through the south end with Lobos Valley Overlook.

    LEARNING ABOUT

    DUNES

    BAKER BEACH

    Our favorite beach in San Francisco was also part of the route. By now we had realized that our timing had been perfect – we’d arrive at the end of the trail just in time for the sunset!

    SEA CLIFF

    The Lands End Trail would be the very last segment of the walk. It’s fair to say we were quite exhausted at this point, waiting to reach Lands End Lookout, our final destination.

    WE MADE IT!

    Around 4:45pm we arrived. It took us about 9.5 hours, with 7.5 hours of that actually walking. Wow, did that feel satisfying to arrive at this (admittedly rather boring) building.

    It was perfect timing: Starting the Crosstown Trail with the sunrise and finishing it with the sunset (yes, with clouds).

    My mask is hiding whether I’m incredibly happy or incredibly exhausted – it was certainly both.

    To every San Franciscan or visitor who likes to explore places in less convential ways, try the Crosstown Trail.

    THE

    END

    WANT MORE?

    I don’t have any more stories yet, but if you care about WordPress or other things going on in my life, check out these:

  • It’s been a while since I have posted on my blog. In fact almost 2 years now. But it’s been even longer since I have significantly touched the foundation of my website; other than the regular updates, adding a small plugin here or there, my website had been using the same infrastructure and theme since 2019. A lot of it even already existed the same way in 2018. My website had gotten really out of date, in terms of both content and technology. Some of the blocks I had implemented years ago were no longer working, so part of me was even afraid to open the block editor.

    A few weeks ago, I finally decided to change that and modernize my website. But it didn’t just came out of nowhere. Specifically, I wanted to update my website to use a block theme. I had been excited about them since they were in the exploration stage already in 2019, pretty much as far back as when I was rebuilding my website, “the old way”. The opportunities for enhancing performance due to the new block theme paradigm seemed extremely promising to me.

    Now that we’ve already had 3 major WordPress releases to establish and refine the new infrastructure, I decided to really give it a try. In this post I’ll share my experiences with you as well as the outcome and how it is impacting performance.

    Read more

  • It is tempting to rely on closed platforms and their native apps: They integrate well with your device’s capabilities and offer easy-to-use features for improved social engagement with your audience – however at the cost of locking you into their proprietary infrastructure and owning your content.

    But the open web has been catching up: A myriad of capabilities has been made available in the past few years through new standardized browser APIs which enable you and your audience to leverage the modern features they expect while remaining decentralized and under your control. To name a few:

    • Add to Home screen: You and your audience can add your website to their device’s home screen so that it shows up there with an icon, the same way they can install a native app, but without all the extra implications of that installation. Enable Add to Home screen in WordPress
    • Offline browsing: No longer will you see your browser’s ugly “Offline” page when losing the network connection, but you remain within the website’s / web app’s UI and can keep browsing content that was previously downloaded. Get offline browsing in WordPress
    • Engaging and replying to content from other websites: What closed social networks have been offering for seemingly ages has now finally come to the open web as well – with the difference that the data remains under your authority. Use webmentions in WordPress
    • Sharing content from your website: You can share content from your website to any other application, relying on your device’s integrated sharing UI – with the extra benefit of not requiring privacy-invasive sharing scripts from other platforms for it. Share content in WordPress

    Another capability which you are probably used to from native apps is sharing content from one app to another. While the last bullet point above covers sharing content from your website (via the Web Share API), it is now also possible to share content to your website (via the Web Share Target API) in the same integrated way, which is what we’re gonna focus on in this post.

    Read more

  • This past weekend, my girlfriend and I walked the 17 mile-long San Francisco Crosstown Trail, which spans from the southeast end to the northwest end of the city. It was an amazing experience and I can totally recommend it to anybody living in or visiting San Francisco. It presented completely new areas of the city to us, and I’m sure that it will even allow long-term San Franciscans that haven’t yet walked it to rediscover their city.

    With all our impressions and photos taken, this made the perfect case for a web story – the open web version of those visual stories we’ve all come to know through platforms like Snapchat or Instagram. If you are interested in creating this kind of immersive content as integrated part of your website as well, try the Web Stories editor plugin for WordPress.

    Read more

  • Moving Continents

    I just passed my first night as a resident of the United States. More precisely, yesterday I took my overseas flight to San Francisco, California, which is where I’ll be living now, at least for the near future. It is certainly still surreal that I am here now and not going to leave in foreseeable time, and it will probably be a while until I have fully grasped it, let alone fully settled in.

    If you’re wondering now, I am still a Developer Programs Engineer for Google, and I am still working in the CMS ecosystem, mostly WordPress. And my primary focus is still going to be engineering the Site Kit plugin. Only from now on, I’m going to work from the offices in San Francisco, in person with the team that is located here.

    So how did this happen?

    Read more