I'd wanted to go to San Francisco since 1967 and the Summer of Love. Wonderful or farcical, depending your age and life view, it's an indisputable 33 years since the hippie counterculture flowered, and slowly withered, on Haight Street. Almost twice the lifetime of my son Simon who, when I finally and recently managed the trip, came with me. Over the two weeks the city delivered, in different ways, to both of us. That's its charm. That's what hasn't changed, yet. Because the one thing everyone talked about in San Francisco was the way the city's changing. In the way, they say, Dublin is changing. There's great interest there in Dublin, in large part due to the waves of new and shining Irish youth arriving there. The west coast is "in" and San Francisco is mellow, man. Just about.
Comparisons with Dublin began the day we arrived. San Francisco, people said, was losing its soul. The city was selling out to IT, soaring property prices and a new greed. San Franciscans were moving out, unable to afford to live there any longer. It was worse than anything the '49ers and the Gold Rush had done to the place. The word was that Dublin was in a similar state. Was it true that the swagger of new wealth was dictating the pace and culture?
The changes aren't apparent on the street or to the tourist. San Francisco is glittering and tacky and homely, full of elegant swathes and views to kill for. It's welcoming and fun and there's nowhere I've been that's quite like it.
The No 14 bus was the discovery of the holiday. It stopped practically on our doorstep and followed the hum and tumult of Mission Street right down to the bay, a route which went from the Latin quarter to the skyscraping financial district and on to the old piers of the Embarcadero. All human, and some extra-terrestial, life used the 14 bus.
"I've been blessed and I've been damned in San Francisco," a black woman wearing rings and padded jacket said to me the first day we got on. "I'm 50 years in this city. Arrived 4th April l952 and I've seen great change, great change. But," she jabbed my shoulder, "I ain't got a record. No record."
She thought us mad to visit the Embarcadero and maybe she was right. The wash from the tour boats cruising between the Golden Gate and Bay bridges almost swept us off the now-defunct piers. We looked at the bridges too, and fed the seagulls.
Early on day two I watched a woman die. The sun doesn't shine every day in San Francisco and the morning fog was damp on the streets when I trotted downhill to the local drag on Cortland. You could have bought anything there and taken up anything from karate to gospel singing. The woman, black and elderly and dressed in navy blue, collapsed at my feet outside a fruit store.
The paramedics arrived as quickly as the gawpers. ER-glamorous they were not. They were competent and caring and dressed in navy blue, like their patient. But they couldn't save her. The crowd was numb, shocked. "Is it a her or a him?" asked a man as the fallen woman's chest was bared. "Don't matter now," said a woman with a dog in her arms, "it's an `it' now." Nothing like this had ever happened on Cortland, they said. Not like a long time anyway.
On the third day we took a city tour. The bus driver had attitude and a head full of facts. "San Francisco covers 49 square miles," he told us, "23 of them hills. The main industry is tourism. The second is brake repair." My aching calves knew all about the hills. We passed the magnificent city library, "so computerised, citizens can't use it," and the rebuilt government buildings, "damaged in the l989 'quake when none of the poor areas were. It was a sign from the Lord to the rich fellas to get their act together. We're still waiting."
A lot of the rich live on Nob Hill, have done since the mansions were built there in the l880s. "A room here would cost you $3,000 a month," the driver sniffed. "It's got so that $1 million homes in San Francisco are quite common." He took us to the elevated Twin Peaks and 360-degree views of the city, to Golden Gate Park and on to Ocean Beach and the edge of the Pacific. These places he approved of.
Friday was for me. We took the 24 bus through Castro, past a rainbow of flags proclaiming gay pride, to Haight-Ashbury. The epicentre of 1960s hippiedom and that fabled Summer of Love is today a benign tourist trap. Latino dudes cruise in white cadillacs. The music is screaming rap. Every other shop sells hash-pipes and water-pipes and retro 1960s gear. There are sad dopeheads aplenty, porn shops, good restaurants and the still great Amoeba music store.
It lives and it's fun - but it's no longer the street to which the impressionable young and the dispossessed made their way to become part of something they didn't know they were starting more than 30 years ago.
On Saturday, we got onto the 14 and went downtown to see the last night of an Irish play. It was a cold night, and windy, with little comfort about for the homeless on the pavement outside the theatre. Inside, the barman bitterly lamented that he was "only one remove from those homeless outside. This city's gotten so expensive it costs a $20 bill every time I go outside my home."
Alex Johnston's play was a two-hander tour de force. Deep Space pleased San Franciscan audiences every bit as much as it did Dubliners when it played here last year and they loved Marcus J. Fox's (Mark Fox to his friend and family in Dublin) brash but emotionally savvy Dub. On Sunday we went to Glide Memorial United Methodist Church. The controversial Rev Cecil Williams is the man in charge and the gospel choir is backed by a jazz band. Sharon Stone prays at Glide. So do Nicolas Cage and his two brothers. Cage, or maybe it was one of the brothers, hopped onto the stage to fix the mikes while we were there. (The Cage-Cappolas are big in San Francisco: Uncle Francis Ford owns one of the trendiest and tastiest restaurants in town.) The music tingled the spine and the Rev Williams delivered great soundbites. "We're about flying, not dying," he said, "we're all one, whether we like it or not."
Later, in Chinatown, we ate too much of the best dim sum ever in the New Asia restaurant and stood in the street afterwards to watch a funeral. The brass band and scattered rice papers were doleful and dignified, in spite of the gaping tourist presence.
Alcatraz, a looming reality every time you looked across the bay, was Simon's gig. We went there next day. As rocks go it was gloomy and grim with an impressive audio tour. It was cold too, and crowded - and how bizarre to see familiar flourishes of fuchsia and hydrangea alongside aloe vera plants!
We were counting the days now and packing in the activity. We walked under and over the Golden Gate Bridge. People jump off it all the time, always from the right-hand side. We drove through the leafy suburbs of Marin County and went to Berkeley to hear Odetta, the blues and folk singer who, at 70, is a legend in her own time. She sang for an hour and 50 minutes about the horrors of TB and homelessness and about the joys of being a woman and alive. "I wish I was an eagle," she said, "but I'm just a plain black crow." She's an eagle. No doubt about it.
We abandoned the 14 bus to be driven by our too-generous hostess to Monterey. Cruising the Pacific coast we felt, like the original Ohlone Indians, that we'd come to the edge of the world. We crossed the San Andreas fault and didn't feel a thing. In Monterey, Cannery Row was awash with tourists and souvenirs.
In the countryside around, Mexican immigrants worked the fields, six days a week from 3 a.m. The average pay is $6.25 an hour, more than 10 times what the average farmworker gets in Mexico. Many are illegal. "We would like an amnesty," one man said, "but nothing, so far. So we diet and we save and do what we can." Plus ca change.
On Labor Day (September 4th), I went thrift shopping. It's the thing to do. I spent $27 on a wardrobe of clothes, some new, some secondhand. The money went to charities as diverse as the Red Cross and gay Buddhist monks.
Through it all, people talked to us of house prices, corrupt dealing, jobs and the homeless. We mightn't see it, they said, but the city was changing. The evidence of spiralling prices and corrupt politicians on trial supports them. But there are some things which, reassuringly, won't change. San Francisco's foundations will always be uncertain and so will the weather. Diversity and harmony are likely to remain rampant and the habit of living for today to rage uninhibited. It's hard to be otherwise when tomorrow the ground might be taken from under your feet.
Rose Doyle's new novel is In Secret Sin (£6.99, TownHouse)