San Francisco or Bust? Yeah, I'll go with bust, please.

In the spirit of fairness, I decided to split up my review of the gallery and my experiences during this visit into different posts. This is mostly because if I did not, there's a very good chance I might make said gallery sound really bad, when it was mostly okay. I surely wouldn't want to use my enormous irrelevance clout as an anonymous blogger to ruin the good name of the Yerba Buena, but even so, the details of the trip had some, shall we say, effects on the visit, which I will now detail here.

If you're frightened and/or squeamish about one angry blogger's indignant ranting, feel free to bail now and watch this soothing video of the ocean on the San Francisco beach instead.

Since I have a truly horrible sense of direction and finding parking in the big city is a form of torture I wouldn't wish on my second-worst enemy (my worst enemy, however, can feel free to contend with it), I decided not to take this trip alone. I went with my whole family. Accounting for traffic, the trip is about two hours both ways and takes us through a toll road, which is always a fun time. Still, this is nothing new when it comes to visiting the Bay Area, so it's no big deal.

And then it got worse. Going to San Francisco is one thing and parking there another matter entirely, but it's doable with some patience. Parking a full-sized van equipped to hold a wheelchair in San Francisco, however, pretty much requires a blood pact with a dark wizard. Or, you know, forty dollars per hour.

I wish I was exaggerating about that last part. See, we're not exactly denizens of the area, so we don't know where the parking near the Yerba Buena is and parking on the street wasn't an option for obvious reasons. Normally, you'd drive around until you find something, but good luck doing that in a huge tugboat of a van with impatient motorists trying to inch up under your chassis at every turn. We ended up at what we thought was a parking garage, but was actually a hotel. They charged us $40 to park there and would have charged double that for two hours.

The parking spot we paid $40 for. Wunderbar.

So if you were wondering why I didn't stay at the Yerba Buena long, there you go. My family didn't even go inside the gallery with me, except for my brother, because we were tapped out from the parking and toll roads. Oh, and the guides were nice enough to tell us about cheaper parking on Fifth and Mission, which would have been useful to know if it weren't for the fact that the hotel was going to charge us the entire hours' worth no matter what.

Just when we thought this trip couldn't have been more of a disappointment, we got to experience a lovely brush with the local law enforcement while hurrying back to Chateau le Larcin. A cop driving a motorcycle cut us off--on the sidewalk. He seriously drove onto the sidewalk to arrest somebody on the street. And said person he was arresting was getting dragged to the ground as we gingerly slunk away. I don't know about you, but my day just isn't complete without watching somebody get arrested while I'm wheeling my brother around with my family in a city I barely know.

Because I'm not a psychopath, I didn't take a picture, so this is the next best thing.

So in the end, we spent less than an hour in San Francisco and lost at least a hundred bucks on the fees and gas (they don't exactly make wheelchair vans fuel-efficient). It was by far the worst trip I've taken down there, not at all helped by the fact that we went to an area we didn't know and pretty much got fleeced for all we're worth. Granted, we've gone to museums as a family before--the de Young Museum even has a decent parking area that's fairly easy to find. I think it's safe to say, though, that we won't be revisiting the Yerba Buena again anytime soon. The trip as a whole gets a solid Baking Chocolate rating.

Let's just say it left a bad taste in our mouths.

But I can be fair. It's not the gallery's fault this trip from my darkest nightmares turned out this way. One thing is for certain though--no matter what they say about San Francisco being cultured and having a rich artistic heritage, it's still the big city. First rule about the big city: don't expect them to do you any favors.