Getting the flavor of...

San Francisco’s ‘Magic Bus’

The first thing our tour guide did was put flowers in our hair, said Sam McManis in The Sacramento Bee. We were in San Francisco, after all, sitting on a pimped-out bus and about to embark on a two-hour tour of the city’s -psychedelic-era landmarks with groovy Gaia serving as our narrator. The Magic Bus (magicbussf.com), created by a local multi-media artist, has been running the same loop since 2010, and you’ve got to be willing to immerse yourself in the traveling show’s hippie vibe to get the most for your $50 fare. As we passed through Chinatown and North Beach, video clips of 1960s figures played before our eyes on the bus’s windows and rock classics blared through the sound system. As we entered Haight-Ashbury, ground zero of the hippie movement, Gaia handed each of us a tab of “acid” to consume. It “looked and tasted suspiciously like a breath mint,” but “heck, why not play along?”

Pennsylvania’s 9/11 memorial

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The memorial for Flight 93 honors the victims with powerful restraint, said Josh Noel in the Chicago Tribune. Located near Shanksville, about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, the memorial marks the place where the United Airlines flight went down on Sept. 11, 2001, after passengers charged the terrorists who had hijacked the plane. Visitors arrive at a plaza where a series of panels recount the events of that day. Beyond the plaza, a quarter-mile-long black path runs through “clean, pastoral land” alongside what once was the airliner’s debris field. Eventually, a slight turn takes visitors toward a sandstone boulder that marks the actual crash site and then on to the memorial’s “stirring conclusion”—a white marble wall, bearing the victims’ names, that runs below the plane’s final flight path toward the ground. The experience is deeply affecting. “Instead of the sentimental, the memorial favors the spare,” and it’s “brilliant.”