I spent a lot of time at the West Portal library branch growing up, and when I went inside a few months ago for old time’s sake, the man behind the desk offered me a San Francisco Public Library Explorer Map. The map of San Francisco has a little gray circle for each of the city’s 27 libraries, at which one can pick up a unique sticker for that library.
I’m currently unemployed and love silly challenges, so I decided to collect each sticker by bicycle. Last week, I finished!
I began visiting libraries opportunistically – Visitation Valley, Portola, and Bayview after a morning of pickleball, Main Library after coffee in Hayes Valley, Eureka Valley after lunch in the Mission, etc.
Eventually, I realized that I’d need to make a concerted effort if I ever wanted to finish. I pulled up Google Maps and the list of hours for each library and mapped out a route to do 18 over two days. It reminded me a bit of the traveling salesman problem, a textbook example when learning about computational complexity.
The final boss was the Treasure Island bookmobile, open 2pm-6pm on Wednesdays. Since I’d biked to every branch and the main library, I wasn’t going to make an exception. Treasure Island is only accessible by bike from the east, so I biked over the Golden Gate Bridge and the Richmond - San Rafael Bridge to get to the eastern half of the Bay Bridge.
The library buildings have their own stories, too, and some of the librarians were eager to share the specifics and history of their branch. When I told one about my mission to bike to every branch, she exclaimed, “over my dead body!” OK, then!
In addition to having a great story at the end of this quest, I also enjoyed exploring the city from a different perspective, even if that perspective sometimes involved a brutal hill.
This silly challenge was a lot of fun, and I need to come up with another one soon!