Bike shops and China Town

Captions from top:
My dinner at the vegetarian Chinese restaurant, good philosophy on their menu, China Town at night, me and my new saddle, Greg Claire and I in the city, Claire and I looking over the Bay

San Francisco Day 4
Day 29
11/14/09

Today was a good day of rest. We worked on the blog this morning and slept in. We got to the local bike shop, The Village Peddler, around 11 and Greg picked up his bike, which needed to have a steer tube extender, bar tape, and new cables put on. The unfortunate part about our experience with that shop is that we paid about twice what we thought it would cost to get the new parts and have them put on. The charged us $16 in labor just to put on the new bar tape. If we had known this we would have just put it all together ourselves. I bought a new stem for my bike to make the handlebars a little taller and hopefully help with my saddle discomfort. I also tried out some saddles, just to find that the one saddle I actually liked cost about $150. That was way too much for a saddle I wasn't 100% sure is what I wanted.

At that point I decided I was going to buy a Brooks leather saddle. Brooks saddles are very hard leather and take a little time to break in, but once broken in are extremely comfortable and can last 20-30 years. I think this is a good investment. I found a shop in downtown San Francisco that had the exact saddle I wanted at a good price, so I went ahead and bought a Brooks B17-S in honey color. I hope this saddle works well for me.

So Sue, Claire, Greg and I went downtown to see more sights and buy the saddle. After picking up the saddle we went to China Town and walked around. We looked through shops and found the best possible deal on postcards. We kept seeing shops postcards get cheaper and cheaper, the further we got into China Town and finally Claire spotted a shop that was selling 10 postcards for $1. SCORE!

We ate at a vegetarian Chinese resturant called Lucky Creation. It was really cheap and extremely good. I had a plate called "mixed veggies in golden nest." It was a nice array of veggies and mushrooms (like 6 different kinds!) as well as bamboo fungus, served in a bowl made of fried rice noodles (see picture).

What a good last day in San Francisco! Tonight we will clean and pack and get ready to head out around noon tomorrow.

Dani