Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Barbary Coast Trail

Have you ever known that there is a marked trail in the city of San Francisco? Well, I have never heard of that until about two weeks ago, even though I have been in the Bay Area for about 6 years now. And yes, it is called "Barbary Coast Trail"!

What is "Barbary Coast Trail"? And why is it so special to be mentioned here? If you are a curious person as I am, you may already have googled it! But here, I will tell you my own expierence of this "Barbary Coast Trail", first handed! ;)

The Barbary Coast Trail is a 3.8 mile walk through the heart of historic San Francisco. As a pathway to San Francisco's past, a series of bronze medallions and arrows embedded in the sidewalk connect the trail’s 20 historic sites, which are shown in the following map (click on the map to see the whole map).



You may wonder now how I got to know about this trail, since I'm one of those kind who need to read "History for Dummies". :P But I have resources other than reading about it myself. My dearest friend H was surfing online and happened to see an introduction of this trail. He told me about it, I'm not particularly interested in history, but one thing really interests me is that you have to follow the bronze medallions to guide through all 20 historic sites. Since all medallions are embedded in the sidewalk, there is a good chance that they can be blocked by the street vender's cart. So you have to really look for them when you walk along the trail. Since neither of us knows how this medallion looks like, plus I just finished "Angle and Demon", the whole thing sounds an adventure to me. So we decided to explore the trail.