Legion of Honor
Started: 2023-08-29 21:00:35
Submitted: 2023-08-29 22:41:46
Visibility: World-readable
Visiting the Legion of Honor on my way home
I spent one night at Parc55 at Union Square in the middle of San Francisco, then on the 6th of August I took a long and circuitous route back home via public transit, with a stop at the Legion of Honor on the far side of San Francisco.
After breakfast I waited for the bus to take me across town to the Richmond (not to be confused with the city of Richmond, which I visited the day before). I was hoping for the 38 Geary special Catbus service, but I had to concede that I probably didn't have the right ticket to board the catbus. When the 38 Geary bus arrived, it was a regular articulated bus that took my Clipper card and carried me west down Geary Boulevard into the Richmond.
I got off the bus at 34th Ave in Outer Richmond and walked the rest of the way to the Legion of Honor. It was a bright clear morning in the quiet residential streets in the Richmond, and people were already playing golf on the hill next to the museum. I walked through the neoclassical colonnade, through the courtyard past a cast of The Thinker, and into the museum.
When we visited London earlier this year, the National Portrait Gallery was closed for renovations; but it turned out that they sent a few pieces from their collection on tour for a special exhibition called "The Tudors" visiting the Legion of Honor, including this famous portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, and the equally-famous picture of Henry VIII, shown opposite Elizabeth in the same room.
I ended up going backwards through the exhibition, starting with Elizabeth I and working backwards through the Tudor monarchs to Henry VIII. The exhibition had a selection of items from their reign: portraits of the monarchs and the people around them, clothing and jewelry they wore, and elaborate furniture and tapestries from their many royal palaces. When I emerged from the exhibition I felt like I had seen an important part of English history, transported half-way across the world to San Francisco.
I don't think I've ever been to the Legion of Honor, so I looked through the permanent displays in the rest of the museum. (I've been to its sibling museum, the de Young Museum, multiple times; it's more conveniently located in Golden Gate Park, and presents more modern work that I find generally more interesting.) There was a bunch of European pottery from the past several centuries in a garden-level gallery around the corner from the Tudors, but the most interesting pieces in the gallery were new commissions by an artist working in ceramics who creates new works that look like they've been broken apart and fused back together, commenting on the simultaneous fragility and durability of ceramics.
Upstairs on the main level were a long series of galleries packed with European painting, plus a bunch of work by Rodin. The last gallery on one wing of the museum had three gigantic Tudor tapestries, one of them depicting (I noted with some distress) a book-burning of heretical works.
I emerged from the museum into the mid-day sun, caught a brief glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge through the cypress trees lining the parking lot, and walked down the hill and along Clement Street to Gordo Taqueria, my favorite taqueria in the Richmond. They barely had any indoor seating before the pandemic, and they still haven't reopened it. The tiny bench in front of the storefront was occupied, so I walked in search of a place to sit and eat and ended up at Argonne Playground, on the other side of Geary Boulevard close to the bus stop I'd need to start my trek home.
To get home by public transit from the Richmond, on the far north-west side of San Francisco, I caught the 38 Geary bus inbound to Union Square, then descended the long escalators to the new T train platform. I rode the T three stops south to the Caltrain station, then walked across the street to join the line waiting to catch the 13:58 departure heading south down the peninsula.
On Sunday, Caltrain runs all-stations stopping service and only manages to operate one train per hour. I was going all the way to San Jose, so my ride took an hour-and-a-half; we finally pulled into Diridon Station at 15:38, giving me plenty of time to see the plane carrying Kiesa and our children on final approach into San Jose airport.
Caltrain and Santa Cruz Metro have not bothered to coordinate their schedules to make transfers easy between their services. On Sunday afternoons, trains arrive in San Jose every hour at 38 minutes past the hour, and the next Santa Cruz Metro #17 bus across the mountain doesn't leave for another 42 minutes. (The #17 bus timetable does line up with the Capitol Corridor service; depending on where I was in San Francisco it might have been easier or faster to nip across the bay (by ferry or BART) to catch the southbound Capitol Corridor service arriving at 15:59.)
My other option for getting home was to meet my family at the airport and catch a ride across the mountain with them. One would think that San Jose transit planners would look at two big transit hubs a few miles away from each other — an airport and a train station next to downtown — and find the best way to get people between these locations. One would be wrong. The best way that VTA can offer to get between San Jose airport and San Jose train station is a light-rail line (running at 30-minute headways on the weekend, with timings that don't line up with the hourly Caltrain service) with a transfer to a bus line. There was no way that I could get from Diridon Station to San Jose Airport by transit in less than 50 minutes — a four-mile trip by road that would take ten minutes. (I could have summoned a Lyft, but that felt like cheating.) One of my goals for this weekend was a transit-heavy trip around the bay, because I'm the sort of nerd who appreciates that kind of thing — and this was a bridge too far for me.
(Had I really wanted to get to the airport from Caltrain, I should have gotten off a stop early at Santa Clara, where the #50 bus that meanders around the airport stops, which would have saved me the circuitous VTA lightrail trip.)
I stuck to my original plan and caught the #17 bus departing San Jose Diridon Station at 16:20. The bus lumbered up highway 17 to the summit, then sped down the far side, delivering me to Cavallaro Transit Center in Scotts Valley a few minutes ahead of the timetable. I drove the rest of the way home, arriving ahead of my family as they drove across the mountain from the airport after their week visiting grandparents in Washington State.
