Jim and I were having our own "love-in" that summer and got married the following May. It's interesting to read all about this stuff again and ironically Jim's current book is the correspondence of Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley on the use of psychedelic (they coined the word) drugs for the treatment of mental illness and assistance in dying. Huxley took LSD when he was dying of cancer and his first wife, Maria, did as well earlier when she was dying of cancer. Both Huxley and Osmond were against the recreational use of these drugs.
Also ironic that these drugs are again being considered for medical purposes so we boomers may be literally tripping out of this world on LSD.
We didn't get to San Francisco until 1971 when we drove down by car with Kari and Doug McCallum when I had Spring Break. I was in my first year teaching in Vancouver and everyone else was still at university. We did it on the total cheap sharing motel rooms with cooking facilities to save money. I think our limit for the four of us was $10 a night. Doug convinced us that bars were part of the cultural experience of the US so we ended up at a lot of bars in the afternoon which worked out pretty well as most served free food and cheap drinks at "Happy Hour".
We got a cheap hotel in SF and we were all so naive about hotels we asked for a "double room" thinking it would be like the motels we had been staying in with sort of separate sleeping areas. The desk clerk gave us a bit of a double take but she gave us the keys to a room which had one bed. We went back down and got two "double rooms". She commented that "you seemed like nice kids but you just never know".
We did splurge for a great meal at Fisherman's Wharf and we did get to Haight-Ashbury which was still pretty hippie at the time. Our other trips to San Francisco were with Don and Elaine and staying at the Hilton. We'll never forget their Sunday Brunch with endless champagne....wonderful seafood and everything else you can imagine. Those were the days when we could eat like that!
And we always went to Original Joe's and I think even Don had to take home some of his meal since the portions were so big...good thing our hotel rooms had minibars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphry_Osmond
