Day 4:
Parade day! We left the room early in order to stake out a good place to see the parade. We walked a couple of blocks up Market and grabbed an empty section of curb… and waited… and waited. It took forever for the parade to reach us. First up, Dykes on Bikes. Hundreds of them. It took a good 10 minutes for them all to pass! Then… more waiting. The rest of the parade was another 10 minutes behind the dykes. I won’t describe the entire parade. It was over 3 hours long! There was a lot of eye candy though, and we took lots of pictures! I’ll post some when we get back.
After the parade, we went back to the room to have a late room service lunch.
What is it with this hotel and food service? We called room service and ordered 2 french dip sandwiches. Simple order… You would think. We got one. When we explained the mix-up to the waitress who brought the food, she apologized profusely and promised to bring another immediately. A half our later… no second sandwich. I was just about to call the front desk when it finally came… Oh well. At least the food was enjoyable.
I wish I could say the same for the festival. It was twice as large in area as the day before, with about 20 times as many people! You could barely move in some areas! The leather area was especially crowded, as it was all packed in to one small block.
The second place we wanted to check out was the Bear Garden; a place set aside for bears and their admirers to socialize, according to the official program. We found the area marked on the map – nothing. Not a sign of it. I asked about it at the main info booth. The person there knew nothing about it. Strike 2.
There were a lot of hot guys, and we tried to get some picture; but again, It was almost impossible in the packed conditions.
(Another gratuitous celebrity sighting:
Sister Roma.)
We tried to walk around and browse the booths; maybe do some more shopping. Bad idea. You couldn’t get anywhere near most of them due to the crowds.
Strike 3. We left and went back to the hotel.
The festival is famous for being free to all. This creates the out of control crowd sizes, IMO, that make it hard to enjoy the festival. They either need to start charging admission, or increase the physical size of it, and spread things out.
In the evening, we headed back up to The Castro. It was hopping! We had dinner at The Sausage Factory. I’ve eaten there before and highly recommend it - good food, cheap price.
We had talked about going to
The Lone Star (SF’s main bear bar), but by the time we finished eating we were tired. So, back to the hotel.
Tomorrow, we go home.